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The term “lore” has, well, a whole lot of lore. Now essential online slang, the word can be traced back to Old English, where it referred primarily to learning, as in the act of teaching or being taught.

Over time, lore came to be associated with more informal knowledge, passed on through word of mouth. The term “folklore,” the “lore of the people”, was coined by the British writer William J. Thoms in 1846. As a result, lore largely slipped out of common usage. By 2024, however, it had made the shortlist for the Oxford word of the year (the title was taken by “brainrot”).

So, how did “lore” come to hold such contemporary relevance? And what does it mean today? The answer can be found, at least in part, in fandom, where “lore” is used to refer to the body of knowledge that exists around a person, fictional universe or character.

Fandom has long facilitated deep dives into media in which fans analyse, discuss and track their favourite storylines and character arcs. This has been particularly true of the science fiction and fantasy genres, due to their complex and expansive narrative universes.

No one’s 20s and 30s look the same. You might be saving for a mortgage or just struggling to pay rent. You could be swiping dating apps, or trying to understand childcare. No matter your current challenges, our Quarter Life series has articles to share in the group chat, or just to remind you that you’re not alone.

Read more from Quarter Life:

• How to be happy with what you have – and avoid the trap of comparison

• Six ways to holiday like an old-school travel journalist – without using the internet

• ‘Thornback’ keeps trending – here’s why this old-fashioned term is derogatory to young, single women

In 1969, science fiction fan and writer Bjo Trimble self-published the first edition of Star Trek Concordance. It was an unofficial reference book for the television series featuring timelines, plot summaries, character biographies and more – information that might now be described as Star Trek lore.

Since then, fans of Star Trek and countless other television shows have continued to create zines, write fan fiction, organise conventions and develop vast and ongoing archives of fan-works. Through such practices, fans develop what media expert Henry Jenkins has described as collective intelligence, as each fan contributes small parts of knowledge to a whole – or, to the lore.

Fandom has, of course, come a long way since the early days of Star Trek. Fan activities have now moved online, where their reach and visibility has significantly increased. Television has changed too, shifting towards the narrative complexity and innovation made possible, in part, by the active engagements of fandoms.

Where fandom was once a niche (and often derided) activity, in recent years fan culture has gone mainstream. From direct communication between fans and producers to the creative possibilities of transmedia storytelling (where productions circulate official content across platforms in ways that echo fan-ish expansions of narrative worlds) media is increasingly inviting audiences to participate in the investigating, cataloguing and circulating of lore.

Pop lore – from K-pop to Gaylor Swift

A powerful example of lore inspiring transmedia storytelling can be found in K-pop. Well known South Korean bands engage with their fans not only through their music, but also with “concepts” (themes that span styling, music and other media) and ever-expanding storytelling universes.

Take, for example, mega-boyband BTS’s meta narrative of the Bangtan Universe. It’s a fictional alternate universe which spans music videos, webtoons (digital comics), short films, mobile games, books and more. This kind of cross-platform storytelling encourages BTS fans to piece together the “lore” of the respective universe.

Storytelling is also central to the popularity of singer-songwriter Taylor Swift, described by Teen Vogue as “the queen of easter eggs”. These hidden messages and inter-textual references can be found in the star’s lyrics, videos, fashion, interviews and even manicures, and produce an expansive archive of Swift lore.

A subsection of Swift lore is known as Gaylor – where fans collate “evidence” that they believe shows that Swift is queer. It is, in part, an example of the expansive possibilities of fandom for queer audiences. But it also speaks to the ethical tensions of fandom and parasocial relationships, as fan-created lore can develop into invasive expectations of celebrities.

Dropping lore on TikTok

As digital media has grown to become part of our daily lives, “lore” has grown too. Today it goes beyond fictional universes and celebrities to also include everyday people and their online stories.

YouTube first invited users to “broadcast yourself” in 2005, and opportunities to do so have only expanded since then, notably with the rise of TikTok.

On TikTok, some users tell stories about their lives and experiences, or their “lore”. In these short videos, lore is “dropped” (revealed) about notable events, defining experiences, relationships (such as ex-lore) and family stories (such as dad lore).

These playful retellings remake real life through narrative conventions of heroism, romance and comic misadventure, while other videos offer ironic commentary on lore-dropping itself.

There is at once authenticity, performance and play here. Stories are, in part, ephemeral, as lore comes and goes in the fast-paced flow of digital content. Circulating via hashtags, however, stories are connected, responded to and remade, facilitating digital intimacies.

The circulation of lore is, at once, user generated and algorithmically curated. In the context of what researchers have described as the datalogical turn (where big data and adaptive algorithms become increasingly central to shaping and understanding society) and the rise of affective capitalism (in which feelings, desires and experiences are capitalised on for economic gain), personal lore also becomes valuable data to be commodified.

Lore then, is an old word with a distinctly contemporary iteration. It’s representative of the ever-expanding convergences of digital media, identity and intimacy.

Kate McNicholas Smith, Lecturer in Television Theory, University of Westminster

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Oviraptorosaurs are weird dinosaurs, which look a bit like flightless birds. But these ancient animals aren’t just funny looking fossils. As my team’s new research shows, they can help us understand how our own forelimbs evolved and challenge what scientists think about the T rex.

Covered in feathers and equipped with a strong, sharp beak, oviraptorosaurs ranged in size from a house cat to a giraffe. They could easily be mistaken for birds if not for the sharp claws on their hands. The oviraptorosaurs lived during the Cretaceous period (between 145 and 66 million years ago) and belonged to a group of dinosaurs called theropods. This is a group of mainly meat-eating dinosaurs with hollow bones that includes the T rex and velociraptor.

Theropod dinosaurs and humans share a common feature: we walk on two legs and use our front limbs for functions other than walking. Although some dinosaurs – the birds – stretched their forelimbs into wings and used them for flight, others, shrunk them instead. Short forelimbs, missing one or more fingers are most famous in the T rex, but many other theropods also evolved shorter arms and hands.

The widespread view among scientists of their shrunken forelimbs as “useless” comes from a 1979 paper. It argues evolution selected for increased head and hindlimb size in the T rex and the arms became smaller as an evolutionary byproduct. So, when my team at the University of Edinburgh analysed patterns of arm evolution in a group of oviraptorosaurs, we expected to find that forelimb reduction and finger loss would be linked.

Instead, we found the opposite. Our study is the latest example of growing evidence that the reduced forelimbs of certain theropods retained some kind of function. Until now, many palaeontologists assumed dinosaurs which evolved shorter arms and lost their fingers did so because they weren’t using them.

Oviraptorosaurs are the perfect group to study finger loss in theropods. Although modern birds did not evolve directly from oviraptorosaurs, they share many features with them. Oviraptorosaurs had toothless beaks, they were covered in feathers, and they sat on carefully constructed nests, with their eggs arranged in neat rings and partly buried. Most of these dinosaurs had long arms with three clawed fingers on each hand, perfect for grasping prey. With one exception.

Oksoko avarsan had stumpy arms and only two functional fingers. It lived in Mongolia during the Late Cretaceous period (about 72-66 million years ago) and would have shared its habitat with a gigantic relative of the T rex called Tarbosaurus. Oksoko did – technically – have a third digit but it was a useless leftover from a time when their ancestors needed all three fingers. In fact, Oksoko’s hands and forelimbs are far more similar to a T rex or a Tarbosaurus than to any of its oviraptorosaurian cousins.

It’s important to understand how theropod forelimbs evolved because they are some of the only animals, alongside humans, to become bipedal. This means they no longer rely on their forelimbs for moving around, whether that’s by walking, climbing, or flying. Their arms were free to evolve new functions. Many of them used their long arms and fingers for grasping. Others, like Oksoko, explored different and more specialised functions.

My team’s research, which analysed how the length of each arm bone changed over time, shows that these dinosaurs lost their third finger in a separate process to the shortening of their arms. This goes against the idea that their arms were functionless. If their forelimbs shrunk because the oviraptorosaurs were not using them, their fingers and forelimbs should have become shorter at the same time. Instead, their arms seem to have shrunk first.

Previous research shows one group of oviraptorosaurs, called the Heyuanninae, expanded their range during the Late Cretaceous (about 100-94 million years ago). They moved from the area that is now southern China into the Gobi Desert in northern China and southern Mongolia. The reduction in arm length coincided with this expansion in their range.

Then Oksoko lost its third finger. Although some other closely related oviraptorosaurs had relatively short third fingers, in none of them was it as reduced as in Oksoko.

Forelimb reduction and finger loss in this group of dinosaurs could have been caused by the new habitat. Once they had moved into the Gobi Desert, they would have come up against new survival challenges. For example, they might have had to adapt to new food sources or different predators. Something about their new habitat favoured dinosaurs with shorter arms and fewer fingers, causing them to evolve their stumpy, two-fingered forelimbs.

We think they started using their arms for a whole new purpose. It’s possible Oksoko used its arms for digging. Oksoko might have lost its third finger, but its first finger is another story. This digit is thick and strong-looking, with a large claw on the end. We can see scars and ridges where its muscles used to be attached to its bones. These show that Oksoko had strong arms.

Rather than reaching and grasping like other oviraptorosaurs, Oksoko could have used its small but mighty forelimbs for scratch-digging. This could have been useful for finding food, such as plant roots and burrowing insects, or for building nests in the ground.

The holotype fossil (the fossil which leads to the naming of a new species) of Oksoko was the most important fossil in our analysis. Originally found by poachers in Mongolia, this fossil was nearly lost to science. Authorities rescued it at the border of Mongolia in 2006 and it was taken to the Institute of Palaeontology, but wasn’t fully studied until 2020. It was Oksoko’s strange two-digit forelimbs that made us want to investigate finger evolution.

Despite the similarities in the size and shape of their forelimbs, it unlikely that T rex and Oksoko used their arms for the same thing. Oksoko was a small herbivore. T rex was a giant carnivore – it was so massive that it couldn’t have reached the ground to dig, even if it tried. But Oksoko shows us that theropod forelimbs can get shorter and lose digits without becoming functionless. And that begs the question: are T rex’s arms as useless as they’re often portrayed?

My team’s new research shows that our initial assumption – that forelimb and digit reduction are caused by function loss in oviraptorosaurs – is probably wrong. Instead, arm-shrinking and finger loss seem to be caused by adaptation to a new environment and the adoption of a new function. This is an example of how evolution can mould forelimbs to suit different habitats and uses.

It is also a step forward in understanding how theropods evolved such an amazing diversity of forelimb shapes and sizes.

Milly Mead, PhD student in Palaeontology and Evolution, University of Edinburgh

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The “music” of starquakes – enormous vibrations caused by bursting bubbles of gas that ripple throughout the bodies of many stars – can reveal far more information about the stars’ histories and inner workings than scientists thought.

In new research published in Nature, we analysed the frequency signatures of starquakes across a broad range of giant stars in the M67 star cluster, almost 3,000 light years from Earth.

Using observations from the Kepler space telescope’s K2 mission, we had a rare opportunity to track the evolution of stars during most of their journey through the giant phase of the stellar life cycle.

In doing so, we discovered that these stars get stuck “playing the same part of their tune” once their turbulent outer layer reaches a sensitive region deep inside.

This discovery reveals a new way to understand the history of stars – and of the entire galaxy.

The sound of starquakes

Starquakes happen in most stars (like our Sun) that have a bubbling outer layer, like a pot of boiling water. Bubbles of hot gas rise and burst at the surface, sending ripples through the entire star that cause it to vibrate in particular ways.

We can detect these vibrations, which occur at specific “resonant frequencies”, by looking for subtle variations in the brightness of the star. By studying the frequencies of each star in a group called a cluster, we can tune into the cluster’s unique “song”.

Our study challenges previous assumptions about resonant frequencies in giant stars, revealing they offer deeper insights into stellar interiors than previously thought. Moreover, our study has opened new ways to decipher the history of our Galaxy.

The melody of a stellar cluster

Astronomers have long sought to understand how stars like our Sun evolve over time.

One of the best ways to do this is by studying clusters – groups of stars that formed together and share the same age and composition. A cluster called M67 has attracted a lot of attention because it contains many stars with a similar chemical makeup to the Sun.

Just as earthquakes help us study Earth’s interior, starquakes reveal what lies beneath a star’s surface. Each star “sings” a melody, with frequencies determined by its internal structure and physical properties.

Larger stars produce deeper, slower vibrations, while smaller stars vibrate at higher pitches. And no star plays just one note – each one resonates with a full spectrum of sound from its interior.

A surprising signature

Among the key frequency signatures is the so-called small spacing – a group of resonant frequencies quite close together. In younger stars, such as the Sun, this signature can provide clues about how much hydrogen the star still has left to burn in its core.

In red giants the situation is different. These older stars have used up all the hydrogen in their cores, which are now inert.

However, hydrogen fusion continues in a shell surrounding the core. It was long assumed that the small spacings in such stars offered little new information.

A stalled note

When we measured the small spacings of stars in M67, we were surprised to see they revealed changes in the star’s internal fusion regions.

As the hydrogen-burning shell thickened, the spacings increased. When the shell moved inward, they shrank.

Then we found something else unexpected: at a certain stage, the small spacings stalled. It was like a record skipping on a note.

We discovered that this stalling appears during a specific stage in the life of a giant star — when its outer envelope, the “boiling” layer that transports heat, grows so deep that it makes up about 80% of the star’s mass. At this point the inner boundary of the envelope reaches into a highly sensitive region of the star.

This boundary is extremely turbulent, and the speed of sound shifts steeply across it — and that steep change affects how sound waves travel through the star. We also found that the stalling frequency is distinctively determined by the star’s mass and chemical composition.

This gives us a new way to identify stars in this phase and estimate their ages with improved precision.

The history of the galaxy

Stars are like fossil records. They carry the imprint of the environments in which they formed, and studying them lets us piece together the story of our galaxy.

The Milky Way has grown by merging with smaller galaxies, forming stars at different times in different regions. Better age estimates across the galaxy help us reconstruct this history in greater detail.

Clusters like M67 also provide a glimpse into the future of our own Sun, offering insight into the changes it will experience over billions of years.

This discovery gives us a new tool – and a new reason to revisit data we already have. With years of seismic observations from across the Milky Way, we can now return to those stars and “listen” again, this time knowing what to listen for.

Claudia Reyes, Postdoctoral Fellow, Research School of Astronomy & Astrophysics, Australian National University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The upcoming Wuthering Heights adaptation by Saltburn director Emerald Fennell has courted controversy since it was first announced, with Fennell’s choice of leading lady and man drawing internet critics.

Playing tragic heroine Catherine Earnshaw is the 34-year-old blonde Margot Robbie, and as tortured Heathcliff will be fellow Aussie, the 27-year-old Jacob Elordi. If you’re familiar with Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel then you know the ages, vibes and looks are just off.

Now fans of the book are aghast in response to a series of leaked photographs of Margot Robbie wearing an elaborate white wedding gown.

Some were quick to point out the historical inaccuracy of the wedding gown, while others argued that “the tradition of a white wedding dress wouldn’t have come around until after the story took place”.

But is that really true? And what would Catherine Earnshaw have actually worn on her wedding day in the late-18th century?

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Most 18th-century brides would have probably worn their Sunday best on their wedding day. This was their finest day dress in the current fashion.

While it may have been an expensive dress, it wouldn’t necessarily have been a purpose-made wedding gown – unless the bride was very wealthy. Significantly, and unlike most wedding dresses today, the gown would also have been worn again on other social occasions.

Brontë tells us nothing about Cathy’s wedding clothes and very little about Cathy and Edgar Linton’s wedding day, which takes place in 1783. However, as the bride of a wealthy landowner she would likely have chosen to have a wedding gown specially made for the occasion in rich silk or satin.

The dress would have been a testament to her new family’s social standing. It would likely have featured a tightly fitted bodice with a low, round neckline characteristic of the period, a sash, and close-fitting, three-quarter length sleeves with a frill.

The wide skirts would have been open to reveal a longer petticoat underneath, or they might have been looped up with ribbons to form three layers in the popular “polonaise” style of the day.

By contrast, the wedding dress that Margot Robbie has been pictured wearing is much more reminiscent of the silhouette in vogue in 1840.

In fact, it appears to take direct inspiration from Queen Victoria’s wedding gown which she wore to marry Albert in February of that year – almost six decades after Cathy’s fictional wedding takes place. Like Queen Victoria’s wedding gown, Robbie’s features a similar off-the-shoulder neckline, short, puffed sleeves and a deep V-shaped bodice.

A white dress?

Queen Victoria is often credited with having started the trend for wearing a white wedding dress. But while she certainly helped to popularise the white gown in the 1840s, she was by no means the sole originator of the tradition. Women were married wearing white long before she chose to do so and they continued to marry wearing dresses of other colours long after.

In 1875, for example, the magazine Beeton’s Young Englishwoman advised one of its readers who wrote in asking for bridal fashion advice, that a grey wedding dress of “Japanese silk would be pretty”, and suggested a silk gown of “pale blue or pale mauve” which “would be useful afterwards”.

Contrary to popular belief that white wedding dresses were not in vogue until the Victorian period, white and silver were in fact the preferred colours for wedding gowns in the 18th century.

The preference for a white or silver wedding dress over a coloured gown can be seen in Oliver Goldsmith’s 1768 comedy play, The Good Natur’d Man, when Garnet, a lady’s maid, tells the soon-to-be married Olivia: “I wish you could take the white and silver [gown] to be married in. It’s the worst luck in the world, in anything but white.”

The historical inaccuracy of Robbie’s Wuthering Heights wedding dress stems not from its colour, then, but primarily from its problematic silhouette.

Of course, historical accuracy is not necessarily the end goal for film directors. Rather, Robbie’s anachronistic wedding gown appears to exemplify a broader trend in historical drama (think Bridgerton) towards a kind of strategic inaccuracy, in which producers and costume designers prioritise experimentation over strict fidelity to period detail.

For all we know, Fennell might have decided to set the adaptation around the time of the novel’s publication rather than its original late-18th and early-19th century setting. Even more intriguingly, she might be using the wedding dress to signal the adaptation’s more modern inflections.

Robbie’s wedding dress and cathedral-length veil wouldn’t look out of place at a contemporary wedding. Basque, or drop waist, wedding dresses dominated New York bridal fashion week in October 2024 and are poised to become a major trend in 2025 having been adopted by celebrities such as actor Millie Bobby Brown and podcaster Alex Cooper. Perhaps Fennell’s Cathy is just extremely fashion forward.

Danielle Mariann Dove, Surrey Future Fellow and Lecturer in English Literature, University of Surrey

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In the ever-changing wellness industry, one diet obsession has captured and held TikTok’s attention: protein.

Whether it’s sharing snaps of protein-packed meals or giving tutorials to boost your intake, the message is clear: maximum protein consumption is essential for weight management and wellness.

Supermarkets have fed this obsession, stacking the shelves with protein-packed bars, shakes and supplements, and protein-boosted versions of just about every food we eat.

But is all this extra protein as beneficial as it’s made out to be? How much protein do we really need?

Different types of protein

Protein is an essential macronutrient our bodies need to function correctly. It’s made up of building blocks called amino acids. Twenty amino acids link in different combinations to form proteins that are classified into:

• essential amino acids – ones our bodies can’t make that we need to get through our diet

• non-essential amino acids – ones our bodies can make.

When we think about protein, animal-based foods such as meat, chicken, fish, eggs and dairy products are usually top of mind.

However, the essential amino acids we need to get from our diet can also be found in many plant-based foods, including legumes, nuts, seeds, wholegrains and soy products like tofu.

Why we need protein

Proteins are often called the workhorses of life. They’re involved in virtually every process that keeps our bodies functioning and play a vital role in:

• building and repairing tissue. From our muscles and bones to our skin and nails, proteins are responsible for their growth, renewal and repair

• fighting infection. Our immune system relies on antibodies, a type of protein, to fight off bacteria and viruses

• transporting substances such as nutrients and blood sugar through our bodies and taking oxygen from our lungs to our cells

• regulating processes. Most of the hormones controlling crucial functions, like our metabolism, are proteins

• managing activity. Protein catalysts, in the form of enzymes, manage vital chemical reactions driving important actions in our bodies, including our ability to digest food

• providing energy. Protein isn’t a primary energy source but it can be used for energy when other sources are low.

Protein also plays an essential role in weight management by:

• increasing satiety, making us feel fuller for longer

• reducing cravings by suppressing ghrelin, an appetite-stimulating hormone

• building and maintaining muscle mass. Muscle determines our metabolic rate and the rate at which we burn calories

• boosting our metabolism. Protein-rich foods also have a high thermic effect (the measure of the energy needed for digestion), meaning they help us burn more calories throughout the day.

So influencers have it half right: protein is a must-have. But that doesn’t mean it’s a more-is-better situation.

How much protein do we actually need?

Our daily protein requirements are based on our body weight, gender and age.

Protein should account for around 15–25% of our total daily energy intake, with the national guidelines recommending

• women consume 0.75 grams of protein per kilo of body weight (and 1.0 grams per kilo of body weight when pregnant or breastfeeding)

• men consume 0.84 grams of protein per kilo of body weight.

A woman weighing 72 kilos, for example, should consume 54 grams of protein daily, while a man weighing 87 kilos should consume 73 grams.

Our recommended protein intake changes as we age, with adults aged over 70 requiring 25% more protein than younger people – or around 67 grams of protein daily for women and 91 grams for men.

This is because, as we age, our bodies stop working as efficiently as before. Around the age of 40, we start experiencing a condition called sarcopenia, where our muscle mass naturally declines, and our body fat starts increasing.

Because muscle mass helps determine our metabolic rate, when our muscle mass decreases, our bodies start to burn fewer calories at rest.

Given the role protein plays in muscle growth and preservation, it’s even more vital as we age.

What does this look like in real life?

By including a protein source at every meal, you can easily meet your daily protein needs. With the example below, you end up with around 125g a day for men and around 100g for women.

Broken down into meals, this might look like:

• breakfast: chickpea scramble = 1.5 fist-sizes of protein

• morning tea: Greek yoghurt and a handful of nuts

• lunch: beef stir fry = 1 fist-size of protein

• afternoon tea: hummus, veggie sticks and one boiled egg

• dinner: lentil and beef bolognese, and salad = half a fist-size of protein.

What happens when we consume too much protein?

The wellness industry may make you think you’re not getting enough protein. But for most people, we are fixating on a problem that doesn’t exist. In fact, you can get too much, when at levels of greater than 2 grams per kilo of body weight per day.

A diet excessively high in protein can lead to nutritional deficiencies that can result in poor immune function, fatigue and a decrease in bone density because you’re likely to lose out on other nutrients.

High meat intake, particularly processed meats, may also increase our risk of cancer and heart disease, and can come with a surplus of energy that leads to weight gain.

Balance is key

Aim for a diet balanced across all of the macronutrients we need: wholegrain carbohydrates, healthy fats and protein.

As a guide, aim to fill a quarter of your plate with lean protein (lean meat, poultry, fish, eggs, tofu, nuts, seeds, legumes or beans), a quarter with wholegrain carbohydrates and the rest with vegetables and fruits.

And avoid those unnecessary, protein-boosted foods and supplements – your health, weight and hip pocket will thank you for it.

At the Boden Group, Charles Perkins Centre, we are running clinical trials for metabolic health. You can register here to express your interest.

Nick Fuller, Clinical Trials Director, Department of Endocrinology, RPA Hospital, University of Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Now that the election has been called for May 3, parliament has been dissolved and the caretaker government period has commenced. During this period, the caretaker conventions require the government to exercise self-restraint. It must stick to routine government business and not embark on major new commitments.

There are commonly claims in the media that various actions by the government breach the caretaker conventions. Before the accusations start flying, here are the basics to help you make your own assessment.

Why do we have caretaker conventions?

There are two reasons for caretaker conventions. First, once parliament is dissolved, the government can no longer be called to account by parliament. It should therefore be more restrained in its actions while not under parliamentary scrutiny.

Second, as a matter of fairness, the government should not be entering into binding commitments immediately before an election, if they will burden an incoming government. It is unfair for an outgoing government to stack important statutory positions with its own people or enter into contracts that commit a new government to policies it opposes.

When do the caretaker conventions apply?

The caretaker conventions commence from the moment parliament is dissolved. They continue until the election result shows the existing government has been returned to office or a new government is formed.

If there is a hung parliament, it may take a few weeks before we know who will form the new government. If important matters have to be resolved during that prolonged caretaker period, the opposition may be consulted to try to get a cooperative outcome. The existing government, however, retains full legal power to act at all times.

How do the caretaker conventions restrict government actions?

Before each federal election, the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet issues a document called Guidance on Caretaker Conventions. It sets out the rules for ministers and public servants.

During the caretaker period, a government must avoid:

• making major policy decisions that are likely to commit an incoming government
• making significant appointments
• entering into major contracts or undertakings, such as entry into treaties or other international agreements.

Whether a decision, appointment or policy is major, is a matter of judgement. In making this assessment, consideration is given to whether it is likely to be controversial or a matter of contention between the government and the opposition. The cost of the decision and its impact on future resources and policies will also be considered.

Both the government and the opposition can still, of course, make election commitments about future action. The caretaker conventions only apply to actions taken within the caretaker period. They also do not apply to decisions made and actions taken before the caretaker period commenced, even if they are only announced after it has commenced.

The public service and the caretaker period

Rules have also developed on the fair use of the public service and public resources before and after elections. Technically, these are not part of the caretaker conventions, which concern self-restraint by ministers. But because they concern fairness in relation to elections, they are often lumped in with the caretaker conventions and they are included within the official guidance document.

These rules are based upon obligations imposed on public servants by statutes and other instruments, such as the Public Service Act 1999 (Cth), and APS Code of Conduct. They require public servants to behave in an impartial and apolitical manner. They also require that public resources not be used to advantage political parties during an election campaign.

It is also customary to restrict the use of government advertising during the caretaker period to necessary matters, and those that do not highlight the role of ministers or promote the achievements or policies of the government.

Two recent examples show how these rules can become controversial during an election campaign. In 2013, the Rudd Labor government was criticised by the opposition for breaching the caretaker conventions by running ads, within Australia, about asylum-seekers not being settled in Australia. The ads were reluctantly approved by public servants under a ministerial direction that they were obliged to obey.

The opposition was happy for the ads to be run in overseas countries, as a source of information and deterrence, but regarded their publication in Australia as partisan and breaching the rules. Opposition spokesperson Scott Morrison called it a “shameless and desperate” grab for votes, with the government spending taxpayers’ money to advertise to the vote-people, rather than the boat people.

On the day of the 2022 election, the Morrison Coalition government instructed the Department of Home Affairs to publish a statement that a boat containing asylum seekers had been intercepted.

It requested that this information be emailed immediately to journalists and tweeted by the Australian Border Force. The issue was highly political. Prime Minister Scott Morrison told a press conference before any announcement had been made that:

I’ve been here to stop this boat. But in order for me to be here to stop those that may come from here, you need to vote Liberals and Nationals today.

Officials published a factual statement about the boat, because they were required to act as directed by the minister. But, as a subsequent investigation revealed, they refused requests to amplify the controversy by sending material to journalists and to publish it on social media, as this would breach their obligations to be apolitical.

Who enforces the caretaker conventions?

The caretaker conventions are not legally binding and cannot be enforced by a court. But some governors-general have given effect to the conventions by deferring action on anything that would breach them. Then, when the election is over, a new government can decide whether to proceed with the matter.

Breaches by public servants of their obligations under codes of conduct and the Public Service Act can have real consequences, such as disciplinary action being taken against them.

While conventions are not legally enforceable, they ordinarily work because there is agreement among political actors that these rules are fair and politically binding on them. Controversy in the media about breaches of conventions can raise public anger. Punishment is left in the hands of the voters.

Anne Twomey, Professor Emerita in Constitutional Law, University of Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Every now and then an athlete comes along who makes people wonder, “how are they so fast?”

Let me introduce you to Gout Gout.

Gout is a 17-year-old sprint sensation from Australia, whose blistering 100m and 200m times have drawn comparison to none other than Jamaican sprint legend Usain Bolt.

While he was edged out over 200 metres in Melbourne last weekend by 21-year-old Lachlan Kennedy – recent 60-metre world indoor silver medallist who is a rising sprinter poised to break the ten-second barrier for 100 metres – Gout’s performances continue to signal a bright future on the track.

In a seven-month period since last August, Gout has:

• won silver in the 200m at the World Junior Championships (20.60 seconds, -0.7 metres/second wind)
• broken Peter Norman’s long-standing Australian 200m record (20.04 seconds, +1.5m/s)
• two weeks ago in Brisbane, smashed through the magical 20-second barrier for the 200m, recording a world-leading 19.98 seconds (+3.6m/s), albeit wind-aided (anything greater than 2.0 metres/second is considered wind-aided).

But what makes Gout so fast?

Is it his explosive start, long stride, top speed or smooth technique?

The answer, as with all athletic outliers, is likely a combination of several unique attributes.

Let’s dive into the science.

The science of sprinting

Sprinting is an ongoing battle of force and mass.

Gravity is pulling the athlete’s body mass down. Meanwhile, the athlete must apply muscular force into the track to keep the body upright.

Research suggests the world’s fastest sprinters generate the highest ground reaction force relative to their body mass and apply it in the shortest period, in the right direction (more horizontally in acceleration and more vertically at top speed).

At 5'11" (180cm) and 66kg, Gout does not display the muscular physiques of past champion sprinters including Asafa Powell (Jamaica), Justin Gatlin (the USA), or Australia’s own Matt Shirvington. Yet his performances suggest is he redefining the archetype of elite sprinting.

For anyone who has run at school, you know the difficulty of holding your top speed for the duration of a 200-metre race.

But Gout defies logic. His speed endurance (maintaining speed) sets him apart from nearly all athletes.

And not just compared to his age group, although he currently sits second on the all-time under-18 200-metre list behind US runner Erriyon Knighton.

Gout’s speed endurance is up there with the best in 200-metre history: Bolt, Michael Johnson or Noah Lyles. Each of them has won multiple Olympic medals.

The fastest official 100-200 metre segment (the final 100 metres of the race) ever run in a 200-metre event is 9.16 seconds by American Lyles, on his way to winning the 2022 world athletics championships in Oregon (19.31 seconds overall).

In Gout’s recent performance in Brisbane, he completed this segment of the race in 9.31 seconds. Bolt and Johnson’s best 100-200 metre segment is 9.27 and 9.20 seconds respectively.

This statistic puts Gout in elite company.

The magic of Gout

Closer analysis of Gout’s performance highlights some sprinting anomalies.

He covers the first 100m of the race in 10.67 seconds, which is quite slow relative to his finishing time of 19.98.

For comparison, when Bolt broke the 200-metre world record in 2009 (19.19 seconds), he ran 9.92 seconds on the curve (and 9.27 seconds on the straight).

But once Gout enters the straight, his magic is on full display.

Gout has an average step length of 2.60 metres. Bolt’s average step length in his 100-metre world record performance was 2.45m, with Lyles displaying a similar result, 2.35m, in his 100-metre win in Paris.

This allows Gout to take between 3.75-4 steps for each ten-metre segment, which he covers at an average speed of 10.8m/s (or 38.8km/h). Like Bolt, his step length is a huge advantage over his competitors.

However, there is a trade-off with step length and step frequency.

Gout’s longer-than-average step length reduces his average step frequency to 4.15Hz (steps per second), much lower than Bolt who averaged 4.47Hz when at his best.

However, research highlights elite sprinters are reliant on either step length or frequency, and athletes should train to their strengths, rather than fixing their weaknesses.

So this may not be an area of concern for the teenager.

Gout also displays a unique coordination pattern in how he interacts with the ground: the way he strikes the track with his feet almost makes it look like he has springs in his spikes.

Well, we all do in a sense.

Elastic energy is stored and released in our Achilles tendon which acts as a muscle power amplifier during running.

Longer Achilles tendon length and stiffness play a huge role in sprint efficiency. This allows athletes to move at faster speeds for longer periods at a reduced energy cost, and may be another one’s of Gout advantages over his contemporaries.

A bright future

At 17, Gout’s performances are out of this world.

The way he generates and maintains speed challenges some conventional paradigms in sprinting – namely that raw power and muscle mass are the primary determinants of speed.

With most elite sprinters peaking in their mid-20s, Gout’s performances at this stage of his career are even more noteworthy.

His success likely highlights the role of his unique coordination patterns, biomechanics, technical efficiency, hard work and great coaching all bundled together.

Gout has already rewritten Australian sprinting history. Next up, he’s taking on the world.

Just don’t blink – he’s that fast, you might miss him.

Dylan Hicks, Lecturer & Movement Scientist / PhD Sports Biomechanics, Flinders University and roland van den Tillaar, Professor in Sports Science, Nord University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Companies developing AI models, such as OpenAI and Meta, train their systems on enormous datasets. These consist of text from newspapers, books (often sourced from unauthorised repositories), academic publications and various internet sources. The material includes works that are copyrighted.

The Atlantic magazine recently alleged Meta, parent company of Facebook and Instagram, had used LibGen, an illegal book repository, to train its generative AI tool. Created around 2008 by Russian scientists, LibGen hosts more than 7.5 million books and 81 million research papers, making it one of the largest online libraries of pirated work in the world.

The practice of training AI on copyrighted material has sparked intense legal debates and raised serious concerns among writers and publishers, who face the risk of their work being devalued or replaced.

While some companies, such as OpenAI, have established formal partnerships with some content providers, many publishers and writers have objected to their intellectual property being used without consent or financial compensation.

Author Tracey Spicer has described Meta’s use of copyrighted books as “peak technocapitalism”, while Sophie Cunningham, chair of the board of the Australian Society of Authors, has accused the company of “treating writers with contempt”.

Meta is being sued in the United States for copyright infringement by a group of authors, including Michael Chabon, Ta-Nehisi Coates and comedian Sarah Silverman. Court documents filed in January allege Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg approved the use of the LibGen dataset for training the company’s AI models knowing it contained pirated material. Meta has declined to comment on the ongoing court case.

The legal battles centre on a fundamental question: does mass data scraping for AI training constitute “fair use”?

Legal challenges

The stakes are particularly high, as AI companies not only train their models using publicly accessible data, but use the content to provide Chatbot answers that may compete with the original creators’ works.

AI companies defend their data scraping on the grounds of innovation and “fair use” – a legal doctrine that, in the US, permits “the unlicensed use of copyright-protected works in certain circumstances”. Those circumstances include research, teaching and commentary. Similar provisions apply in other legal jurisdictions, including Australia.

AI companies argue their use of copyrighted works for training purposes is transformative. But when AI can reproduce content that closely mimics an author’s style or regenerates substantial portions of copyrighted material, legitimate questions arise about whether this constitutes infringement.

A landmark legal case in this battle is The New York Times vs OpenAI and Microsoft. Launched in late 2023, the case is ongoing. The New York Times alleges copyright infringement, claiming OpenAI and its partner Microsoft used millions of its articles without permission, to train AI systems.

Although the scope of the lawsuit has been narrowed to core claims relating to copyright and trademark dilution infringement, a recent court decision allowing the case to proceed to trial has been seen as a win for the New York Times.

Other news publishers, including News Corp, have also initiated legal proceedings against AI companies.

The concern extends beyond traditional publishers and news organisations to individual creators, who face threats to their livelihoods. In 2023, a group of authors – including Jonathan Franzen, John Grisham and George R.R. Martin – filed a class-action suit, still unresolved, alleging OpenAI copied their works without permission or payment.

Implications

These and numerous other legal challenges will have significant implications for the future of the publishing and media industries, and for AI companies.

The issue is particularly alarming, considering that in 2023, the average median full-time income for an author in the United States was was just over USD$20,000. The situation is even more dire in Australia, where authors earn an average of AUD$18,200 per year.

In response to these challenges, the Australian Society of Authors (ASA) has called for the Australian government to regulate AI. Its proposal is that AI companies should be required to obtain permission before using copyrighted work and must provide fair compensation to writers who grant authorisation.

The ASA has also called for clear labelling of content that is wholly or partially AI generated, and transparency regarding which copyrighted works have been used for AI training and the purposes of that training.

If training AI on copyrighted works is permissible, what compensation model is fair to original creators?

In 2024, HarperCollins signed a deal allowing limited use of selected nonfiction backlist titles for AI training. The three-year non-exclusive agreement affected over 150 Australian authors. It gave them the choice to opt in for USD$2,500, split 50/50 between writer and publisher.

However, the Authors Guild argues a 50/50 split is not fair and recommends 75% should go to the author and only 25% to the publisher.

Potential responses

Publishers and creators are increasingly concerned about the loss of control of intellectual property. AI systems rarely cite sources, diminishing the value of attribution. If these systems can generate content that substitutes for published works, this has the potential to reduce demand for original content.

As AI-generated content floods the market, distinguishing and protecting original works becomes more challenging. Amazon has already been swamped by AI-generated content, including imitations and book summaries, sold as ebooks.

Lawmakers in various jurisdictions are considering updates to national copyright laws specifically addressing AI, which aim to promote innovation and safeguard rights. But the responses are diverging dramatically.

The European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Act of 2024 aims to balance copyright holders’ interests with innovation in AI development. The copyright provisions were added late in negotiations and are considered relatively weak. But they provide additional tools for copyright holders to identify potential infringements and give general purpose AI providers more legal certainty, if they comply with the rules.

Any plans to regulate AI have been explicitly rejected by US vice president JD Vance. In February, at the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit in Paris, Vance described “excessive regulation” as “authoritarian censorship” that undermined the development of AI.

This stance reflects the broader US approach to AI regulation. In their submissions to the US government’s AI Action Plan currently under development, both OpenAI and Google argue AI companies should be able to freely train their models on copyrighted material under the “fair use” principle, as part of “a copyright strategy that promotes the freedom to learn”.

This position raises significant concerns for content creators.

Deal or no deal?

In addition to legal frameworks, various models are being developed globally to ensure creators and publishers are being paid, while allowing AI companies to use the data.

Since mid-2023, several academic publishers, including Informa (the parent company of Taylor & Francis), Wiley and Oxford University Press, have established licensing agreements with AI companies.

Other publishers are making direct deals with AI companies, along similar lines to HarperCollins. In Australia, Black Inc. recently asked its authors to sign opt-in agreements permitting the use of their work for AI training purposes.

A variety of licensing platforms, such as Created by Humans, have emerged. These aim to facilitate the legal use of copyrighted materials for AI training and clearly indicate to readers when a book is written by humans, not AI-generated.

To date, the Australian government has not enacted any specific statutes that would directly regulate AI. In September 2024, the government released a voluntary framework consisting of eight AI Ethics Principles, which call for transparency, accountability and fairness in AI systems.

The use of copyrighted works to train AI systems remains contested legal territory. Both AI developers and creators have valid interests at stake. There is a clear need to balance technological innovation with sustainable models for original content creation.

Finding the right balance between these interests will likely require a combination of legal precedent, new business models and thoughtful policy development.

As courts begin to rule on these cases, we may see clearer guidelines emerge about what constitutes fair use in AI training and AI-driven content creation, and what compensation models might be appropriate. Ultimately, the future of human creativity hangs in the balance.

Agata Mrva-Montoya, Senior Lecturer, Department of Media and Communications, University of Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Social media has recently been flooded with images that looked like they belonged in a Studio Ghibli film. Selfies, family photos and even memes have been re-imagined with the soft pastel palette characteristic of the Japanese animation company founded by Hayao Miyazaki.

This followed OpenAI’s latest update to ChatGPT. The update significantly improved ChatGPT’s image generation capabilities, allowing users to create convincing Ghibli-style images in mere seconds. It has been enormously popular – so much so, in fact, that the system crashed due to user demand.

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems such as ChatGPT are best understood as “style engines”. And what we are seeing now is these systems offering users more precision and control than ever before.

But this is also raising entirely new questions about copyright and creative ownership.

How the new ChatGPT makes images

Generative AI programs work by producing outputs in response to user prompts, including prompts to create an image.

Previous generations of AI image generators used diffusion models. These models gradually refine random, noisy data into a coherent image. But the latest update to ChatGPT uses what’s known as an “autoregressive algorithm”.

This algorithm treats images more like language, breaking them down into “tokens”. Just as ChatGPT predicts the most likely words in a sentence, it can now predict different visual elements in an image separately.

This tokenisation enables the algorithm to better separate certain features of an image – and their relationship with words in a prompt. As a result, ChatGPT can more accurately create images from precise user prompts than previous generations of image generators. It can replace or change specific features while preserving the rest of the image, and it improves on the longstanding issue of generating correct text in images.

A particularly powerful advantage of generating images inside a large language model is the ability to draw on all the knowledge already encoded in the system. This means users don’t need to describe every aspect of an image in painstaking detail. They can simply refer to concepts such as Studio Ghibli and the AI understands the reference.

The recent Studio Ghibli trend began with OpenAI itself, before spreading among Silcon Valley software engineers and then even governments and politicians – including seemingly unlikely uses such as the White House creating a Ghiblified image of a crying woman being deported and the Indian government promoting Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s narrative of a “New India”.

Understanding AI as ‘style engines’

Generative AI systems don’t store information in any traditional sense. Instead they encode text, facts, or image fragments as patterns – or “styles” – within their neural networks.

Trained on vast amounts of data, AI models learn to recognise patterns at multiple levels. Lower network layers might capture basic features such as word relationships or visual textures. Higher layers encode more complex concepts or visual elements.

This means everything – objects, properties, writing genres, professional voices – gets transformed into styles. When AI learns about Miyazaki’s work, it’s not storing actual Studio Ghibli frames (though image generators may sometimes produce close imitations of input images). Instead, it’s encoding “Ghibli-ness” as a mathematical pattern – a style that can be applied to new images.

The same happens with bananas, cats or corporate emails. The AI learns “banana-ness”, “cat-ness” or “corporate email-ness” – patterns that define what makes something recognisably a banana, cat or a professional communication.

The encoding and transfer of styles has for a long time been an express goal in visual AI. Now we have an image generator that achieves this with unprecedented scale and control.

This approach unlocks remarkable creative possibilities across both text and images. If everything is a style, then these styles can be freely combined and transferred. That’s why we refer to these systems as “style engines”. Try creating an armchair in the style of a cat, or in elvish style.

The copyright controversy: when styles become identity

While the ability to work with styles is what makes generative AI so powerful, it’s also at the heart of growing controversy. For many artists, there’s something deeply unsettling about seeing their distinctive artistic approaches reduced to just another “style” that anyone can apply with a simple text prompt.

Hayao Miyazaki has not publicly commented on the recent trend of people using ChatGPT to generate images in his world-famous animation style. But he has been critical of AI previously.

All of this also raises entirely new questions about copyright and creative ownership.

Traditionally, copyright law doesn’t protect styles – only specific expressions. You can’t copyright a music genre such as “ska” or an art movement such as “impressionism”.

This limitation exists for good reason. If someone could monopolise an entire style, it would stifle creative expression for everyone else.

But there’s a difference between general styles and highly distinctive ones that become almost synonymous with someone’s identity. When an AI can generate work “in the style of Greg Rutkowski” – a Polish artist whose name was reportedly used in over more than 93,000 prompts in AI image generator Stable Diffusion – it potentially threatens both his livelihood and artistic legacy.

Some creators have already taken legal action.

In a case filed in late 2022, three artists formed a class to sue multiple AI companies, arguing that their image generators were trained on their original works without permission, and now allow users to generate derivative works mimicking their distinctive styles.

As technology evolves faster than the law, work is under way on new legislation to try and balance technological innovation with protecting artists’ creative identities.

Whatever the outcome, these debates highlight the transformative nature of AI style engines – and the need to consider both their untapped creative potential and more nuanced protections of distinctive artistic styles.

Kai Riemer, Professor of Information Technology and Organisation, University of Sydney and Sandra Peter, Director of Sydney Executive Plus, University of Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Getting a headache during or after exercise can be seriously frustrating – especially if you have kept hydrated to try and stop them from happening.

But why do these headaches occur? And does keeping hydrated make any difference?

What are exercise headaches?

Exercise headaches (also known as “exertional headaches”) are exactly what they sound like: headaches that occur either during, or after, exercise.

French doctor Jules Tinel first reported these headaches in the medical literature in 1932 and they’ve been a regular point of discussion since.

Exercise headaches commonly present as a throbbing pain on both sides of the head. They most often occur after strenuous exercise – although what is considered “strenuous” can differ between people, depending on their fitness levels. They can last anywhere from a few minutes to a couple of days.

Exercise headaches are thought to impact about 12% of adults, although this number varies from 1% all the way up to 26% across individual studies.

In most circumstances, these headaches are harmless and will resolve on their own, over time. Some research suggests you will stop getting them after a few months of starting a new type of workout.

But while they are usually harmless, they can sometimes signal an underlying condition that requires medical attention.

What causes exercise headaches?

Despite a good amount of research looking at exertional headaches, we don’t know their exact cause, but we do think we know why they occur.

The leading theory suggests they are caused by changes in blood flow to the brain. During intense exercise, blood vessels in the brain dilate, increasing blood flow and pressure, leading to pain.

Because long-term exercise improves our cardiovascular health, including our ability to dilate and constrict our blood vessels, this theory makes sense when we consider that exercise headaches tend to resolve themselves over time. This might explain why research suggests fitter people are less likely to get exercise headaches.

People with migraines appear more likely to experience exercise headaches, which are thought to be caused by this same mechanism.

Does heat and dehydration cause exercise headaches?

There is evidence suggesting that exercise headaches are more likely to occur in the heat.

Your brain cannot dissipate heat by sweating like the rest of your body can. So when it’s hot, your body has to increase blood flow to the brain to help bring down its temperature, which can increase pressure.

Similarly, exercise headaches also seem to get worse, and occur more often, when people are dehydrated.

However, we are not sure why this happens. Some research has shown that dehydration results in increased strain during exercise. As such, dehydration might not necessarily cause the headache, but make it more likely to occur.

Red flags: when to see a doctor

Most exercise headaches resolve themselves after a few hours and result in no lasting negative effects.

In some rare instances, they could be sign of something more serious occurring in the brain, such as a subarachnoid haemorrhage (a bleed between the brain and the tissues that cover it), reversible cerebral vasoconstriction syndrome (a spasming of blood vessels), cervical artery dissection (or tear), intracranial hypertension (pressure in the brain), or an infection.

See a doctor to rule out anything serious if:

• it’s your first exercise headache
• the headache is severe and sudden (also known as a thunderclap headache)
• it’s accompanied by other symptoms such as vision changes, confusion, or sensations of weakness
• you experience a stiff neck, nausea, or vomiting with your headache
• it lasts for more than 24 hours and doesn’t seem to be getting better.

Can you prevent exercise headaches?

There is no surefire way to prevent exercise headaches.

But a recent review suggests that ensuring you’re adequately hydrated and gradually warm-up to your desired exercise intensity can make them less likely to occur.

Beyond this, you may wish to keep your exercise intensity in a light-to moderate range for a couple of months. This will give your cardiovascular system some time to adapt before trying more strenuous exercise, hopefully reducing the likelihood of getting exercise headaches at all.

Exercise headaches are annoying, but are generally harmless and should subside on their own over time.

Hunter Bennett, Lecturer in Exercise Science, University of South Australia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

On Thursday 27 March, the European Space Agency (ESA) sent its last messages to the Gaia Spacecraft. They told Gaia to shut down its communication systems and central computer and said goodbye to this amazing space telescope.

Gaia has been the most successful ESA space mission ever, so why did they turn Gaia off? What did Gaia achieve? And perhaps most importantly, why was it my favourite space telescope?

Running on empty

Gaia was retired for a simple reason: after more than 11 years in space, it ran out of the cold gas propellant it needed to keep scanning the sky.

The telescope did its last observation on 15 January 2025. The ESA team then performed testing for a few weeks, before telling Gaia to leave its home at a point in space called L2 and start orbiting the Sun away from Earth.

L2 is one of five “Lagrangian points” around Earth and the Sun where gravitational conditions make for a nice, stable orbit. L2 is located 1.5 million kilometres from Earth on the “dark side”, opposite the Sun.

L2 is a highly prized location because it’s a stable spot to orbit, it’s close enough to Earth for easy communication, and spacecraft can use the Sun behind them for solar power while looking away from the Sun out into space.

It’s also too far away from Earth to send anyone on a repair mission, so once your spacecraft gets there it’s on its own.

Keeping L2 clear

L2 currently hosts the James Webb Space Telescope (operated by the USA, Europe and Canada), the European Euclid mission, the Chinese Chang’e 6 orbiter and the joint Russian-German Spektr-RG observatory. Since L2 is such a key location for space missions, it’s essential to keep it clear of debris and retired spacecraft.

Gaia used its thrusters for the last time to push itself away from L2, and is now drifting around the Sun in a “retirement orbit” where it won’t get in anybody’s way.

As part of the retirement process, the Gaia team wrote farewell messages into the craft’s software and sent it the names of around 1,500 people who worked on Gaia over the years.

What is Gaia?

Gaia looks a bit like a spinning top hat in space. Its main mission was to produce a detailed, three-dimensional map of our galaxy, the Milky Way.

To do this, it measured the precise positions and motions of 1.46 billion objects in space. Gaia also measured brightnesses and variability and those data were used to provide temperatures, gravitational parameters, stellar types and more for millions of stars. One of the key pieces of information Gaia provided was the distance to millions of stars.

A cosmic measuring tape

I’m a radio astronomer, which means I use radio telescopes here on Earth to explore the Universe. Radio light is the longest wavelength of light, invisible to human eyes, and I use it to investigate magnetic stars.

But even though I’m a radio astronomer and Gaia was an optical telescope, looking at the same wavelengths of light our eyes can see, I use Gaia data almost every single day.

I used it today to find out how far away, how bright, and how fast a star was. Before Gaia, I would probably never have known how far away that star was.

This is essential for figuring out how bright the stars I study really are, which helps me understand the physics of what’s happening in and around them.

A huge success

Gaia has contributed to thousands of articles in astronomy journals. Papers released by the Gaia collaboration have been cited well over 20,000 times in total.

Gaia has produced too many science results to share here. To take just one example, Gaia improved our understanding of the structure of our own galaxy by showing that it has multiple spiral arms that are less sharply defined than we previously thought.

Not really the end for Gaia

It’s difficult to express how revolutionary Gaia has been for astronomy, but we can let the numbers speak for themselves. Around five astronomy journal articles are published every day that use Gaia data, making Gaia the most successful ESA mission ever. And that won’t come to a complete stop when Gaia retires.

The Gaia collaboration has published three data releases so far. This is where the collaboration performs the processing and checks on the data, adds some important analysis and releases all of that in one big hit.

And luckily, there are two more big data releases with even more information to come. The fourth data release is expected in mid to late 2026. The fifth and final data release, containing all of the Gaia data from the whole mission, will come out sometime in the 2030s.

This article is my own small tribute to a telescope that changed astronomy as we know it. So I will end by saying a huge thank you to everyone who has ever worked on this amazing space mission, whether it was engineering and operations, turning the data into the amazing resource it is, or any of the other many jobs that make a mission successful. And thank you to those who continue to work on the data as we speak.

Finally, thank you to my favourite space telescope. Goodbye, Gaia, I’ll miss you.

Laura Nicole Driessen, Postdoctoral Researcher in Radio Astronomy, University of Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Once yelled at women seen to be pestering or annoying – or at feminists questioning and threatening the status quo – “harpy” has long been used as a derogatory term targeting women.

But have you ever wondered what a harpy was in the first place?

Much like similar derogatory titles “siren” and “fury”, the term “harpy” is derived from a group of monstrous female figures from ancient Greek and Roman mythology.

Who were the harpies?

In Greek and Roman myth, the harpies were a group of animal-human hybrid monsters on par with other such mythological creatures like the sirens, the sphinx, and the centaurs.

Harpies were commonly imagined as an amalgam of a bird’s body, such as wings and claws, with a woman’s head.

The ancient story of the Aeneid, by Latin poet Virgil, describes the story’s hero Aeneas encountering harpies on his quest to found Rome, saying:

Maiden faces have these birds, foulest filth they drop, clawed hands are theirs, and faces ever gaunt with hunger.

This description matches a common design from Greek and Roman art of birds with women’s heads.

In Greco-Roman myth, the harpies were typically tasked with meting out justice on behalf of Zeus and other gods by using their great speed from their wings and sharp talons.

The importance of their claws was likely a result of their name, which was derived from the Ancient Greek word for “snatching” (ἁρπάζω or harpazdo).

As was common of many mythological figures with hybrid features, the way their animal features were portrayed tended to vary across different media (art or literature), different narrative purposes, and over time.

Sometimes the claws were emphasised; other times it was their supernaturally swift wings and voracious hunger.

Enforcers of swift justice

The harpies were not nice people. They existed in myth to dish out punishments from the gods.

Their primary target? Phineus, a seer and king of Salmydessus in Thrace, a city believed to have been located on the Western coast of the Black Sea near the modern day Turkish town of Kıyıköy.

His story is told in the Argonautica by ancient Greek author Apollonius of Rhodes. This tale centres on the journey of Jason and the Argonauts in search of the golden fleece.

In the story, Phineus is said to have abused his powers as a seer by sharing too many of the gods’ secrets with mortals.

This was among the most egregious of crimes in the eyes of the gods, so an especially awful punishment was decided upon.

Phineus was blinded and given the dubious gift of immortality while still allowed to age endlessly. And worst of all, he was set upon by the harpies.

Every time Phineus picked up and tried to eat food, the harpies would burst out from the clouds, moving as fast as lightning, and

with their crooked beaks incessantly snatched the food away from his mouth and hands.

The harpies brought a further gift for Phineus: their smell. This supernaturally “intolerable stench” could putrefy food, so any scraps the harpies didn’t grab were left rotting on the table. You couldn’t even stand near it, “so foully reeked the remnants of the meal”.

And while the harpies swooped in and out in seconds, their smell stuck to the rotting food (and probably poor Phineus).

Some ancient poets add a little extra zest and disgust by also suggesting the harpies may have been defecating on the food, and presumably Phineus.

Most notable is Virgil in his text the Aeneid who wrote about “foedissima ventris proluvies”, meaning:

the foulest discharges from their bellies.

This was likely an exaggeration of their bird-like qualities, used to emphasise how disgusting and monstrous they were.

Phineus was eventually given a reprieve from the harpies, by order of Zeus, so he could help the hero Jason on his quest for the golden fleece.

Having completed their job, the harpies then flew to Crete to live in a cave far away from annoying mortals – only being disturbed once by Aeneas on his meandering path to Rome.

The story of Phineus helped harpies become a metaphor for greed.

Those compared to harpies could include greedy house-guests overstaying their welcome, people living extravagantly or frivolously, or even family members taking advantage of wealthy relatives.

Although the harpies were female monsters, the term was not exclusively applied to women, but used to describe groups of greedy people.

Harpies today

Happily, today the title of “harpy” is falling out of favour as a derogatory term. But the hordes of monstrous, snatching, winged women live on in modern books, games, comics, movies and TV shows.

From video games with swathes of harpy-like creatures snatching and clawing at the protagonist, like the 2020 video game Hades, to characters in stories inspired by Greek and Roman myth, the harpies are sticking around – like a bad smell.

Kitty Smith, PhD Candidate in Classical Greek and Roman History, University of Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

More than five years since COVID was declared a pandemic, we’re still facing the regular emergence of new variants of the virus, SARS-CoV-2.

The latest variant on the rise is LP.8.1. It’s increasing in Australia, making up close to one in five COVID cases in New South Wales.

Elsewhere it’s become even more dominant, comprising at least three in five cases in the United Kingdom, for example.

So what is LP.8.1? And is it cause for concern? Let’s look at what we know so far.

An offshoot of Omicron

LP.8.1 was first detected in July 2024. It’s a descendant of Omicron, specifically of KP.1.1.3, which is descended from JN.1, a subvariant that caused large waves of COVID infections around the world in late 2023 and early 2024.

The World Health Organization (WHO) designated LP.8.1 as a variant under monitoring in January. This was in response to its significant growth globally, and reflects that it has genetic changes which may allow the virus to spread more easily and pose a greater risk to human health.

Specifically, LP.8.1 has mutations at six locations in its spike protein, the protein which allows SARS-CoV-2 to attach to our cells. One of these mutations, V445R, is thought to allow this variant to spread more easily relative to other circulating variants. V445R has been shown to increase binding to human lung cells in laboratory studies.

Notably, the symptoms of LP.8.1 don’t appear to be any more severe than other circulating strains. And the WHO has evaluated the additional public health risk LP.8.1 poses at a global level to be low. What’s more, LP.8.1 remains a variant under monitoring, rather than a variant of interest or a variant of concern.

In other words, these changes to the virus with LP.8.1 are small, and not likely to make a big difference to the trajectory of the pandemic.

That doesn’t mean cases won’t rise

COVID as a whole is still a major national and international health concern. So far this year there have been close to 45,000 new cases recorded in Australia, while around 260 people are currently in hospital with the virus.

Because many people are no longer testing or reporting their infections, the real number of cases is probably far higher.

In Australia, LP.8.1 has become the third most dominant strain in NSW (behind XEC and KP.3).

It has been growing over the past couple of months and this trend looks set to continue.

This is not to say it’s not growing similarly in other states and territories, however NSW Health publishes weekly respiratory surveillance with a breakdown of different COVID variants in the state.

Sequences of LP.8.1 in the GISAID database, used to track the prevalence of variants around the world, increased from around 3% at the end of 2024 to 38% of global sequences as of mid March.

In some countries it’s climbed particularly high. In the United States LP.8.1 is responsible for 55% of cases. In the UK, where LP.8.1 is making up at least 60% of cases, scientists fear it may be driving a new wave.

Will COVID vaccines work against LP.8.1?

Current COVID vaccines, including the most recently available JN.1 shots, are still expected to offer good protection against symptomatic and severe disease with LP.8.1.

Nonetheless, due to its designation as a variant under monitoring, WHO member countries will continue to study the behaviour of the LP.8.1 variant, including any potential capacity to evade our immunity.

While there’s no cause for panic due to LP.8.1 variant at this stage, COVID can still be a severe disease for some. Continued vigilance and vaccination, particularly for medically vulnerable groups, is essential in minimising the impact of the disease.

Thomas Jeffries, Senior Lecturer in Microbiology, Western Sydney University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Earlier this year news broke about doctors in London curing blindness in children with a rare genetic condition.

The genetic condition was a severe, albeit rare, form of retinal dystrophy. It causes severe sight impairment and can be caused by defects in many different genes.

In this case, the four young patients had mutations in the gene encoding AIPL1. This accounts for up to 5% of infants affected by this condition, and has no treatment.

In this study, published in The Lancet, a team from the Moorfields Eye Hospital and University College London Institute of Ophthalmology injected a new copy of the gene AIPL1 into one eye of each patient to replace the defective one. The four children in the study showed improved functional vision without serious adverse effects.

The story of this incredible breakthrough actually begins 132 years ago. It highlights the importance of research done not for any clear application in the world – just curiosity. But around the world, this kind of research is under threat.

Understanding the world – just for the sake of it

Curiosity-driven research is exactly what it sounds like: research driven by the goal of understanding nature without regard for application. It has many aliases. “Blue-sky research”, “discovery science” and “basic science” are all terms commonly used to describe this approach.

This kind of research differs from “mission-directed research”, which focuses primarily on practical applications and whose goals are set by governments and industry.

The logic behind curiosity-driven research is that understanding how things work will inevitably lead to discoveries that will fuel innovation.

Historically, this has led to transformational discoveries. Another recent example is the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, which was awarded to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman for discoveries that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID.

The recent study in The Lancet follows more than a century of curiosity-driven discoveries culminating in these four children receiving their life-changing injections.

Sketching the structure of the retina

The kind of medical intervention used on these patients is called a gene therapy.

In this case, the cause of the condition is a defect in a single gene. This defect leads to the malfunction of an individual protein in the eye that is required for vision. The approach essentially is to provide a working copy of that gene to the eye, to restore function. This requires not only the technology to deliver the therapy, but the underlying knowledge of how AIPL1 functions in normal vision.

This knowledge dates back to 1893, when the pioneer of modern neuroscience, Santiago Ramon y Cajal, exquisitely sketched the structure of the retina – the light-sensitive tissue at the back of the eye.

In the 132 years since, our knowledge of how this tissue converts light into an electrical signal for our brain to interpret as vision has significantly advanced. We now understand a lot about how this works.

This foundational knowledge also means we know precisely why a dysfunctional AIPL1 gene leads to severe vision impairment. It also enables us to predict that providing a working version could improve vision. Armed with this knowledge, we have an engineering problem. How do we get a working copy into the eye?

In this case, the working copy of AIPL1 was delivered by an adeno-associated virus, or AAV. These were first discovered in the mid-1960s, and without realising their therapeutic potential, several research groups dedicated themselves to understanding their biology.

An AAV was first used in a human patient in 1995 for the treatment of cystic fibrosis. Without this curiosity-driven research they would not have been developed into a gene therapy platform. This is how most modern therapies have emerged.

Protecting curiosity-driven research

This is one of hundreds of therapies taking a similar approach. We will likely see many more stories like this in the coming decades. But I am certain we won’t see any examples where we don’t understand the underlying biology.

Curiosity-driven research, focused on understanding how biology works, is essential for the development of therapies to treat human disease. The history of medical advances shows us this time and time again.

Curiosity-driven breakthroughs include the discovery of X-rays as well as the antibiotic penicillin. The discovery of CRISPR/Cas9, an ancient bacterial defence, has enabled the editing of DNA with unprecedented precision. This has already led to an FDA-approved therapy to treat sickle cell disease.

Australia has punched above its weight in this arena for many years. But this is no longer the case.

Funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council, our largest funder of medical research, has been falling since 2020. More broadly, this coincides with a decline in the proportion of basic research being funded in Australia and directly threatens our capacity for curiosity-driven innovation.

Internationally, this strong focus on practical application is repeated. For example, 83% of the European Union’s €95.5 billion research funding program supports mission-directed research.

In Australia, and globally, we must protect curiosity-driven research at all costs and not underestimate the vital contribution it will make to our future.

Sean Coakley, Senior Research Fellow, School of Biomedical Sciences, The University of Queensland

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The “music” of starquakes – enormous vibrations caused by bursting bubbles of gas that ripple throughout the bodies of many stars – can reveal far more information about the stars’ histories and inner workings than scientists thought.

In new research published in Nature, we analysed the frequency signatures of starquakes across a broad range of giant stars in the M67 star cluster, almost 3,000 light years from Earth.

Using observations from the Kepler space telescope’s K2 mission, we had a rare opportunity to track the evolution of stars during most of their journey through the giant phase of the stellar life cycle.

In doing so, we discovered that these stars get stuck “playing the same part of their tune” once their turbulent outer layer reaches a sensitive region deep inside.

This discovery reveals a new way to understand the history of stars – and of the entire galaxy.

The sound of starquakes

Starquakes happen in most stars (like our Sun) that have a bubbling outer layer, like a pot of boiling water. Bubbles of hot gas rise and burst at the surface, sending ripples through the entire star that cause it to vibrate in particular ways.

We can detect these vibrations, which occur at specific “resonant frequencies”, by looking for subtle variations in the brightness of the star. By studying the frequencies of each star in a group called a cluster, we can tune into the cluster’s unique “song”.

Our study challenges previous assumptions about resonant frequencies in giant stars, revealing they offer deeper insights into stellar interiors than previously thought. Moreover, our study has opened new ways to decipher the history of our Galaxy.

The melody of a stellar cluster

Astronomers have long sought to understand how stars like our Sun evolve over time.

One of the best ways to do this is by studying clusters – groups of stars that formed together and share the same age and composition. A cluster called M67 has attracted a lot of attention because it contains many stars with a similar chemical makeup to the Sun.

Just as earthquakes help us study Earth’s interior, starquakes reveal what lies beneath a star’s surface. Each star “sings” a melody, with frequencies determined by its internal structure and physical properties.

Larger stars produce deeper, slower vibrations, while smaller stars vibrate at higher pitches. And no star plays just one note – each one resonates with a full spectrum of sound from its interior.

A surprising signature

Among the key frequency signatures is the so-called small spacing – a group of resonant frequencies quite close together. In younger stars, such as the Sun, this signature can provide clues about how much hydrogen the star still has left to burn in its core.

In red giants the situation is different. These older stars have used up all the hydrogen in their cores, which are now inert.

However, hydrogen fusion continues in a shell surrounding the core. It was long assumed that the small spacings in such stars offered little new information.

A stalled note

When we measured the small spacings of stars in M67, we were surprised to see they revealed changes in the star’s internal fusion regions.

As the hydrogen-burning shell thickened, the spacings increased. When the shell moved inward, they shrank.

Then we found something else unexpected: at a certain stage, the small spacings stalled. It was like a record skipping on a note.

We discovered that this stalling appears during a specific stage in the life of a giant star — when its outer envelope, the “boiling” layer that transports heat, grows so deep that it makes up about 80% of the star’s mass. At this point the inner boundary of the envelope reaches into a highly sensitive region of the star.

This boundary is extremely turbulent, and the speed of sound shifts steeply across it — and that steep change affects how sound waves travel through the star. We also found that the stalling frequency is distinctively determined by the star’s mass and chemical composition.

This gives us a new way to identify stars in this phase and estimate their ages with improved precision.

The history of the galaxy

Stars are like fossil records. They carry the imprint of the environments in which they formed, and studying them lets us piece together the story of our galaxy.

The Milky Way has grown by merging with smaller galaxies, forming stars at different times in different regions. Better age estimates across the galaxy help us reconstruct this history in greater detail.

Clusters like M67 also provide a glimpse into the future of our own Sun, offering insight into the changes it will experience over billions of years.

This discovery gives us a new tool – and a new reason to revisit data we already have. With years of seismic observations from across the Milky Way, we can now return to those stars and “listen” again, this time knowing what to listen for.

Claudia Reyes, Postdoctoral Fellow, Research School of Astronomy & Astrophysics, Australian National University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

It’s that time of year when flu vaccines are becoming available in Australia. You may have received an email from your GP clinic or a text message from your pharmacy telling you they’re in stock.

So far in 2025 in Australia, there have been more flu notifications compared to the same period in previous years.

Elsewhere, many northern hemisphere countries have reported intense flu activity during the 2024–25 winter season. This has included several deaths in children.

Although it’s difficult to make predictions about the intensity and timing of the upcoming flu season, it’s a good time to start thinking about vaccination.

Who should get vaccinated, and when?

In Australia, flu vaccines are available for everyone over the age of six months. Flu vaccines don’t work well in young infants, but they can be protected if their mothers are immunised during pregnancy.

The National Immunisation Program provides free vaccines for people at higher risk, including specific age groups (adults older than 65 and children between six months and five years), those with chronic medical conditions, pregnant women and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

For healthy adults and children outside these groups, a flu vaccine costs around A$20–30. The vaccines are widely available at GPs and pharmacies, and through workplace programs.

Flu vaccines reduce the risk of GP presentation with influenza by around 30–60% and hospitalisation with influenza by about 50–70%.

There’s some evidence the protection from flu vaccines wanes over several months. Ideally, everyone would get vaccinated within a few months of the peak of the flu season. But in reality, we can’t easily predict when this will occur, and since the COVID pandemic, flu seasons have arrived unusually early in the year. So, some time in the next month or so is a good time to get vaccinated.

In general, flu vaccines can be given at the same time as most other vaccines, including COVID vaccines, but check with your vaccination provider about whether this is appropriate for you.

Influenza vaccines are regarded as safe. While some people may get a sore arm or fever, these symptoms are usually mild and short lived. Serious side effects, such as Guillain-Barré syndrome, are rare, and are thought to be less common than after influenza infection.

Why do we need a flu vaccine every year?

Influenza is a difficult virus to make vaccines for, as the virus changes frequently, and vaccines generally only provide protection against a limited range of strains. Some studies suggest mutations in the influenza virus are 20 times more common than with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID.

This means, each year, experts need to predict the likely circulating strains in the next season, so vaccines can be manufactured in preparation.

The World Health Organization coordinates two meetings each year – in February to decide on vaccine strains for the following northern hemisphere season, and around September for the southern hemisphere.

Although all current influenza vaccines contain strains from four influenza subtypes (A/H1N1, A/H3N2, B Victoria and B Yamagata), one of the strains appears to have disappeared during the pandemic. So next year’s vaccines will probably drop the B Yamagata strain.

Seasonal flu vaccines don’t provide protection against avian influenza (bird flu) strains, but vaccination is still recommended for people who may be at risk of bird flu, such as poultry workers. This is to reduce the chance that a new virus could result from the combination of both seasonal and avian influenza strains.

Which vaccines are available?

There are a variety of vaccines you may be offered when you book in or turn up for a flu vaccine.

Over the past few years, new types of vaccines have been developed. Some of these attempt to improve the body’s immune response to vaccines. For example, Fluad Quad contains an adjuvant called MF59, an additional substance designed to attract immune cells to the site of vaccination.

Other vaccines, such as Fluzone High-Dose, use a larger dose of the vaccine strains to improve the immune response. These vaccines are recommended for older people, as immune responses tend to decline with age.

Certain vaccines use alternative production methods to try to improve the match between vaccine strains and the circulating strains. Standard flu vaccines are produced using influenza viruses grown in chicken eggs. One weakness of this method is that viral mutations can occur during the production process, known as “egg adaptation”. During some of the seasons between 2014 and 2019, this was shown to reduce the effectiveness of flu vaccines.

The avoid this issue, cell-based vaccines, such as Flucelvax Quad, use influenza vaccine strains grown in mammalian cells rather than eggs.

The key takeaways are:

1. older people are recommended to receive an enhanced vaccine (Fluad Quad for >65 years or Fluzone High-Dose for >60 years), with Fluad Quad provided free under the National Immunisation Program

2. other people are recommended to receive a standard vaccine (egg-based or cell-based), with vaccines provided free for high-risk groups and children between six months and five years.

Looking to the future

There are several new flu vaccines currently under development. Recombinant vaccines, such as Flublok, use insect cells to produce a specific component of the virus.

With the success of mRNA vaccines for COVID, there is interest in using a similar process for influenza. In theory, this could shorten the time to develop vaccines, for both seasonal influenza and pandemic influenza.

There’s also interest in combination vaccines – for example, a single shot could provide protection against both COVID and the flu.

The “holy grail” of influenza vaccines is one that could provide long-lasting protection against many different strains. Although we’re not there yet, you’re at lower risk of influenza and its complications if you get a flu shot.

Allen Cheng, Professor of Infectious Diseases, Monash University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

More than 500 million people around the world live with osteoarthritis. The knee is affected more often than any other joint, with symptoms (such as pain, stiffness and reduced movement) affecting work, sleep, sport and daily activities.

Knee osteoarthritis is often thought of as thinning of the protective layer of cartilage within the joint. But we now understand it affects all the structures of the joint, including the bones, muscles and nerve endings.

While there are things that can be done to manage the symptoms of knee osteoarthritis, there is no cure, and many people experience persistent pain. As a result, an opportunity exists for as yet unproven treatments to enter the market, often before regulatory safeguards can be put in place.

Stem cell injections are one such treatment. A new review my colleagues and I published this week finds that evidence of their benefits and harms remains elusive.

Stem cell treatments

Stem cells are already established as treatments for some diseases – mostly disorders of the blood, bone marrow or immune system – which has led to suggestions they could be used for a much wider array of conditions.

Stem cells have been touted as promising treatments for osteoarthritis because they have special properties which allow them to replicate and develop into the mature healthy cells that make up our body’s organs and other tissues, including cartilage.

Stem cell treatments for osteoarthritis generally involve taking a sample of tissue from a site that is rich in stem cells (such as bone marrow or fat), treating it to increase the number of stem cells, then injecting it into the joint.

The hope is that if the right type of stem cells can be introduced into an osteoarthritic joint in the right way and at the right time, they may help to repair damaged structures in the joint, or have other effects such as reducing inflammation.

But no matter how convincing the theory, we need good evidence for effectiveness and safety before a new therapy is adopted into practice.

Stem cell injections have not been approved by Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration for the treatment of osteoarthritis. Nonetheless, some clinics in Australia and around the world still offer them.

Because of the regulatory restrictions, we don’t have reliable numbers on how many procedures are being done.

They’re not covered by Medicare, so the procedure can cost the consumer thousands of dollars.

And, as with any invasive procedure, both the harvest of stem cells and the joint injection procedure may carry the potential for harm, such as infection.

What we found

Our new review, published by the independent, international group the Cochrane Collaboration, looks at all 25 randomised trials of stem cell injections for knee osteoarthritis that have been conducted worldwide to date. Collectively, these studies involved 1,341 participants.

We found stem cell injections may slightly improve pain and function compared with a placebo injection, but the size of the improvement may be too small for the patient to notice.

The evidence isn’t strong enough to determine whether there is any improvement in quality of life following a stem cell injection, whether cartilage regrows, or to estimate the risk of harm.

This means we can’t confidently say yet whether any improvement that might follow a stem cell injection is worth the risk (or the cost).

Hope or hype?

It’s not surprising we invest hope in finding a transformative treatment for such a common and disabling condition. Belief in the benefits of stem cells is widespread – more than three-quarters of Americans believe stem cells can relieve arthritis pain and more than half believe this treatment to be curative.

But what happens if a new treatment is introduced to practice before it has been clearly proven to be safe and effective?

The use of an unproven, invasive therapy is not just associated with the risks of the intervention itself. Even if the treatment were harmless, there is the risk of unnecessary cost, inconvenience, and a missed opportunity for the patient to use existing therapies that are known to be effective.

What’s more, if we need to play catch-up to try to establish an evidence base for a treatment that’s already in practice, we risk diverting scarce research resources towards a therapy that may not prove to be effective, simply because the genie is out of the bottle.

Working towards a clearer answer

Several more large clinical trials are currently underway, and should increase our understanding of whether stem cell injections are safe and effective for knee osteoarthritis.

Our review incorporates “living evidence”. This means we will continue to add the results of new trials as soon as they’re published, so the review is always up to date, and offers a comprehensive and trustworthy summary to help people with osteoarthritis and their health-care providers to make informed decisions.

In the meantime, there are a number of evidence-based treatment options. Non-drug treatments such as physiotherapy, regular exercise, maintaining a healthy weight, and cognitive behavioural therapy can be more effective than you think. Anti-inflammatory and pain medications can also play a supporting role.

Importantly, it’s not inevitable that osteoarthritic joints get worse with time. So, even though joint replacement surgery is often highly effective, it’s the last resort and fortunately, many people never need to take this step.

Samuel Whittle, ANZMUSC Practitioner Fellow, Monash University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Authorities in New South Wales and Victoria have been warning the public about worrying cases of heroin overdoses after people thought they had taken cocaine or methamphetamine.

We know the issue is also relevant to other parts of Australia. And it’s particularly concerning because heroin can cause life-threatening opioid overdoses, particularly in people inexperienced with heroin who snort it.

Our new research sheds more light on what happens to people who accidentally took heroin thinking it was something else.

What we did and what we found

We are part of a NSW Health program that helps to find and quickly respond to concerning illicit and recreational drug poisonings and trends. The program is a collaboration between many government health services, including hospitals, the NSW Poisons Information Centre and labs.

We searched our database and found 34 cases of opioid overdoses after using what people thought to be a stimulant drug between January 2022 and June 2024. A total of 19 people thought they were taking cocaine and 15 methamphetamine.

Most of these 34 people had a severe opioid overdose requiring treatment by paramedics and in hospital. Sadly, two people died.

Heroin was the opioid in all cases where we specifically tested for it, and we suspect all the cases.

Cases occurred across NSW but most cases (68%) were in Sydney. In the last eight months of our study we identified multiple cases each month which may indicate these cases are becoming more common.

In the United States, drugs like cocaine and methamphetamine are sometimes mixed with the potent opioid drug fentanyl. This unintentional use of opioids is causing many deaths in the US. But we didn’t find any evidence that fentanyl was the cause of the overdoses we examined.

What happens when you take heroin by accident?

Cocaine and methamphetamine are stimulant drugs. These are drugs that make a person feel more energetic and confident, and their pupils become larger.

They have the opposite effect to heroin, which is an opioid and sedative. Heroin and other opioids make a person feel relaxed and often drowsy, with smaller pupils.

When overdosing, opioids cause loss of consciousness and a person’s breathing slows or even stops, which is life-threatening. Severe opioid overdose without prompt treatment is lethal.

If you expect to be taking cocaine or methamphetamine, but it is actually heroin, or has some heroin in it, you will very likely overdose. This is particularly true if you don’t usually take opioids, or if you use it for the first time. People can overdose from as little as snorting a line.

Why is this happening?

Sometimes people get a different drug than they wanted. This can happen because the drug is mixed with something else or swapped.

This can happen for many reasons, including during manufacturing and distribution. It can happen intentionally or unintentionally by the dealer or people using the drug.

One major reason is that you sometimes can’t tell heroin apart from cocaine or methamphetamine just by looking at them. So if drugs are mixed or swapped, you can’t always tell until you take them.

What can we do about it?

Opioid deaths are preventable. Government and community groups are working together to respond to the problem, either via issuing drug alerts or by educating their members.

But people who take illicit or recreational drugs can reduce their risk by avoiding using drugs alone, and by making sure one person in their group is able to get help if needed.

Unexpected sleepiness is a reason to seek help, not to simply rest. Start CPR if someone is not responsive and call 000.

How about naloxone?

Definitely, if someone is experiencing an opioid overdose, give them naloxone as soon as possible.

Naloxone is a life-saving medicine that can temporarily reverse an opioid overdose. It comes in an easy-to-use nasal spray, and as a pre-filled injection.

It’s available for free and without a prescription via the national Take Home Naloxone program. You can also order it online and get it by post.

Naloxone is for anyone who may experience, or witness, an opioid overdose or adverse reaction.

NSW authorities recommend it for people who use any illicit drugs including opioids, stimulants (like cocaine, methamphetamine and MDMA), ketamine and counterfeit pharmaceuticals, due to the risk of drugs being mixed with something else or swapped. Call 000 even if you have given naloxone.

You can report unexpected overdoses to the Poisons Information Centre from anywhere in Australia on 131 126. In an emergency in Australia, call 000.

Darren Roberts, Conjoint Associate Professor in Clinical Pharmacology and Toxicology, St Vincent’s Healthcare Clinical Campus, UNSW Sydney; Jared Brown, Clinical Senior Lecturer, Sydney Pharmacy School, Faculty of Medicine and Health, University of Sydney, and Peter Chisholm, Conjoint Associate Lecturer, School of Population Health, UNSW Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Now that the election has been called for May 3, parliament has been dissolved and the caretaker government period has commenced. During this period, the caretaker conventions require the government to exercise self-restraint. It must stick to routine government business and not embark on major new commitments.

There are commonly claims in the media that various actions by the government breach the caretaker conventions. Before the accusations start flying, here are the basics to help you make your own assessment.

Why do we have caretaker conventions?

There are two reasons for caretaker conventions. First, once parliament is dissolved, the government can no longer be called to account by parliament. It should therefore be more restrained in its actions while not under parliamentary scrutiny.

Second, as a matter of fairness, the government should not be entering into binding commitments immediately before an election, if they will burden an incoming government. It is unfair for an outgoing government to stack important statutory positions with its own people or enter into contracts that commit a new government to policies it opposes.

When do the caretaker conventions apply?

The caretaker conventions commence from the moment parliament is dissolved. They continue until the election result shows the existing government has been returned to office or a new government is formed.

If there is a hung parliament, it may take a few weeks before we know who will form the new government. If important matters have to be resolved during that prolonged caretaker period, the opposition may be consulted to try to get a cooperative outcome. The existing government, however, retains full legal power to act at all times.

How do the caretaker conventions restrict government actions?

Before each federal election, the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet issues a document called Guidance on Caretaker Conventions. It sets out the rules for ministers and public servants.

During the caretaker period, a government must avoid:

• making major policy decisions that are likely to commit an incoming government
• making significant appointments
• entering into major contracts or undertakings, such as entry into treaties or other international agreements.

Whether a decision, appointment or policy is major, is a matter of judgement. In making this assessment, consideration is given to whether it is likely to be controversial or a matter of contention between the government and the opposition. The cost of the decision and its impact on future resources and policies will also be considered.

Both the government and the opposition can still, of course, make election commitments about future action. The caretaker conventions only apply to actions taken within the caretaker period. They also do not apply to decisions made and actions taken before the caretaker period commenced, even if they are only announced after it has commenced.

The public service and the caretaker period

Rules have also developed on the fair use of the public service and public resources before and after elections. Technically, these are not part of the caretaker conventions, which concern self-restraint by ministers. But because they concern fairness in relation to elections, they are often lumped in with the caretaker conventions and they are included within the official guidance document.

These rules are based upon obligations imposed on public servants by statutes and other instruments, such as the Public Service Act 1999 (Cth), and APS Code of Conduct. They require public servants to behave in an impartial and apolitical manner. They also require that public resources not be used to advantage political parties during an election campaign.

It is also customary to restrict the use of government advertising during the caretaker period to necessary matters, and those that do not highlight the role of ministers or promote the achievements or policies of the government.

Two recent examples show how these rules can become controversial during an election campaign. In 2013, the Rudd Labor government was criticised by the opposition for breaching the caretaker conventions by running ads, within Australia, about asylum-seekers not being settled in Australia. The ads were reluctantly approved by public servants under a ministerial direction that they were obliged to obey.

The opposition was happy for the ads to be run in overseas countries, as a source of information and deterrence, but regarded their publication in Australia as partisan and breaching the rules. Opposition spokesperson Scott Morrison called it a “shameless and desperate” grab for votes, with the government spending taxpayers’ money to advertise to the vote-people, rather than the boat people.

On the day of the 2022 election, the Morrison Coalition government instructed the Department of Home Affairs to publish a statement that a boat containing asylum seekers had been intercepted.

It requested that this information be emailed immediately to journalists and tweeted by the Australian Border Force. The issue was highly political. Prime Minister Scott Morrison told a press conference before any announcement had been made that:

I’ve been here to stop this boat. But in order for me to be here to stop those that may come from here, you need to vote Liberals and Nationals today.

Officials published a factual statement about the boat, because they were required to act as directed by the minister. But, as a subsequent investigation revealed, they refused requests to amplify the controversy by sending material to journalists and to publish it on social media, as this would breach their obligations to be apolitical.

Who enforces the caretaker conventions?

The caretaker conventions are not legally binding and cannot be enforced by a court. But some governors-general have given effect to the conventions by deferring action on anything that would breach them. Then, when the election is over, a new government can decide whether to proceed with the matter.

Breaches by public servants of their obligations under codes of conduct and the Public Service Act can have real consequences, such as disciplinary action being taken against them.

While conventions are not legally enforceable, they ordinarily work because there is agreement among political actors that these rules are fair and politically binding on them. Controversy in the media about breaches of conventions can raise public anger. Punishment is left in the hands of the voters.

Anne Twomey, Professor Emerita in Constitutional Law, University of Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Nasa’s Curiosity Mars rover has detected the largest organic (carbon-containing) molecules ever found on the red planet. The discovery is one of the most significant findings in the search for evidence of past life on Mars. This is because, on Earth at least, relatively complex, long-chain carbon molecules are involved in biology. These molecules could actually be fragments of fatty acids, which are found in, for example, the membranes surrounding biological cells.

Scientists think that, if life ever emerged on Mars, it was probably microbial in nature. Because microbes are so small, it’s difficult to be definitive about any potential evidence for life found on Mars. Such evidence needs more powerful scientific instruments that are too large to be put on a rover.

The organic molecules found by Curiosity consist of carbon atoms linked in long chains, with other elements bonded to them, like hydrogen and oxygen. They come from a 3.7-billion-year-old rock dubbed Cumberland, encountered by the rover at a presumed dried-up lakebed in Mars’s Gale Crater. Scientists used the Sample Analysis at Mars (Sam) instrument on the Nasa rover to make their discovery.

Scientists were actually looking for evidence of amino acids, which are the building blocks of proteins and therefore key components of life as we know it. But this unexpected finding is almost as exciting. The research is published in Proceedings of the National Academies of Science.

Among the molecules were decane, which has 10 carbon atoms and 22 hydrogen atoms, and dodecane, with 12 carbons and 26 hydrogen atoms. These are known as alkanes, which fall under the umbrella of the chemical compounds known as hydrocarbons.

It’s an exciting time in the search for life on Mars. In March this year, scientists presented evidence of features in a different rock sampled elsewhere on Mars by the Perseverance rover. These features, dubbed “leopard spots” and “poppy seeds”, could have been produced by the action of microbial life in the distant past, or not. The findings were presented at a US conference and have not yet been published in a peer reviewed journal.

The Mars Sample Return mission, a collaboration between Nasa and the European Space Agency, offers hope that samples of rock collected and stored by Perseverance could be brought to Earth for study in laboratories. The powerful instruments available in terrestrial labs could finally confirm whether or not there is clear evidence for past life on Mars. However, in 2023, an independent review board criticised increases in Mars Sample Return’s budget. This prompted the agencies to rethink how the mission could be carried out. They are currently studying two revised options.

Signs of life?

Cumberland was found in a region of Gale Crater called Yellowknife Bay. This area contains rock formations that look suspiciously like those formed when sediment builds up at the bottom of a lake. One of Curiosity’s scientific goals is to examine the prospect that past conditions on Mars would have been suitable for the development of life, so an ancient lakebed is the perfect place to look for them.

The researchers think that the alkane molecules may once have been components of more complex fatty acid molecules. On Earth, fatty acids are components of fats and oils. They are produced through biological activity in processes that help form cell membranes, for example. The suggested presence of fatty acids in this rock sample has been around for several years, but the new paper details the full evidence.

Fatty acids are long, linear hydrocarbon molecules with a carboxyl group (COOH) at one end and a methyl group (CH3) at the other, forming a chain of carbon and hydrogen atoms.

A fat molecule consists of two main components: glycerol and fatty acids. Glycerol is an alcohol molecule with three carbon atoms, five hydrogens, and three hydroxyl (chemically bonded oxygen and hydrogen, OH) groups. Fatty acids may have 4-36 carbon atoms; however, most of them have 12-18. The longest carbon chains found in Cumberland are 12 atoms long.

Organic molecules preserved in ancient Martian rocks provide a critical record of the past habitability of Mars and could be chemical biosignatures (signs that life was once there).

The sample from Cumberland has been analysed by the Sam instrument many times, using different experimental techniques, and has shown evidence of clay minerals, as well as the first (smaller and simpler) organic molecules found on Mars, back in 2015. These included several classes of chlorinated and sulphur-containing organic compounds in Gale crater sedimentary rocks, with chemical structures of up to six carbon atoms. The new discovery doubles the number of carbon atoms found in a single molecule on Mars.

The alkane molecules are significant in the search for biosignatures on Mars, but how they actually formed remains unclear. They could also be derived through geological or other chemical mechanisms that do not involve fatty acids or life. These are known as abiotic sources. However, the fact that they exist intact today in samples that have been exposed to a harsh environment for many millions of years gives astrobiologists (scientists who study the possibility of life beyond Earth) hope that evidence of ancient life might still be detectable today.

It is possible the sample contains even longer chain organic molecules. It may also contain more complex molecules that are indicative of life, rather than geological processes. Unfortunately, Sam is not capable of detecting those, so the next step is to deliver Martian rock and soil to more capable laboratories on the Earth. Mars Sample Return would do this with the samples already gathered by the Perseverance Mars rover. All that’s needed now is the budget.

Derek Ward-Thompson, Professor of Astrophysics, University of Central Lancashire and Megan Argo, Senior Lecturer in Astronomy, University of Central Lancashire

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Owing to its violent political history, West Papua’s vibrant human past has long been ignored.

Unlike its neighbour, the independent country of Papua New Guinea, West Papua’s cultural history is poorly understood. But now, for the first time, we have recorded this history in detail, shedding light on 50 millennia of untold stories of social change.

By examining the territory’s archaeology, anthropology and linguistics, our new book fits together the missing puzzle pieces in Australasia’s human history. The book is the first to celebrate West Papua’s deep past, involving authors from West Papua itself, as well as Indonesia, Australasia and beyond.

The new evidence shows West Papua is central to understanding how humans moved from Eurasia into the Australasian region, how they adapted to challenging new environments, independently developed agriculture, exchanged genes and languages, and traded exquisitely crafted objects.

Early seafaring and adaptation

During the Pleistocene epoch (2.5 million to 12,000 years ago), West Papua was connected to Australia in a massive continent called Sahul.

Archaeological evidence from the limestone chamber of Mololo Cave shows some of the first people to settle Sahul arrived on the shores of present-day West Papua. There they quickly adapted to a host of new ecologies.

The precise date of arrival of the first seafaring groups on Sahul is debated. However, a tree resin artefact from Mololo has been radiocarbon dated to show this happened more than 50,000 years ago.

Genetic analyses support this early arrival time to Sahul. Our work suggests these earliest seafarers crossed along the northern route, one of two passages through the Indonesian islands.

Interestingly, the first migrants carried with them the genetic legacy of intermarriages between our species, Homo sapiens, and the Denisovans, a now extinct species of hominins that lived in eastern Asia. Geneticists currently dispute whether these encounters took place in Southeast Asia, along a northerly or southerly route to Sahul, or even in Sahul itself.

In the same way modern European populations retain about 2% of Neanderthal ancestry, many West Papuans retain about 3% of Denisovan heritage.

As the Earth warmed at the end of the Pleistocene, rising seas split Sahul apart. The large savannah plains that joined West Papua and Papua New Guinea to Australia were submerged around 8,000 years ago. Much of West Papua’s southern and western coastlines became islands.

Social transformations during the past 10,000 years

As environments changed, so did people’s cuisine and culture.

We know from sites in Papua New Guinea that people developed their own agricultural systems between 10,000 and 6,000 years ago, at a similar time to innovations in Asia and the Americas. However, agricultural systems were not universally adopted across the island.

New chemical evidence from human tooth enamel in West Papua shows people retained a wide variety of diets, from fish and shellfish to forest plants and marsupials.

One of the key unanswered questions in West Papua’s history is when cultivation emerged and how it spread into other regions, including Southeast Asia. Taro, bananas, yams and sago were all initially cultivated in New Guinea and have become important staple crops around the world.

The arrival of pottery, some 3,000 years ago, represents movements of new people to the Pacific. These are best illustrated by iconic Lapita pottery, recorded by archaeologists from Papua New Guinea all the way to Samoa and Tonga.

Lapita pottery makers spoke Austronesian languages, which became the ancestors of today’s Polynesian languages, including Māori.

New pottery discoveries from Mololo Cave suggest the ancestors of Lapita pottery makers existed somewhere around West Papua. Finding the location of these ancestral Lapita settlements is a major priority for archaeological research in the territory.

Other evidence for social transformations includes rock paintings and even bronze axes. The latter were imported all the way from mainland Southeast Asia to West Papua around 2,000 years ago. Metal working was not practised in West Papua at this time and chemical analyses show some of these artefacts were made in northern Vietnam.

At all times in the past, people had a rich and complex material culture. But only a small fraction of these objects survive for archaeologists to study, especially in humid tropical conditions.

Living traditions and the movement of objects

From the early 1800s, when West Papua was part of the Dutch East Indies, colonial administrators, scientists and explorers exported tonnes of West Papuan artefacts to European museums. Sometimes the objects were traded or gifted, other times stolen outright.

In the early 1900s, many objects were also burned by missionaries who saw Indigenous material culture as evidence of paganism. The West Papuan objects that now inhabit museums in Europe, America, Australia and New Zealand are connections between modern people and their ancestral traditions.

Sometimes these objects represent people’s direct ancestors. Major work is currently underway to connect West Papuans with these collections and to repatriate some of these objects to museums in West Papua. Unfortunately, funding remains a central issue for these museums.

Many West Papuans continue to produce and use wooden carvings, string bags and shell ornaments. Anthropologists have described how people are actively reconfiguring their material culture, especially given the presence of new synthetic materials and a cash economy.

Far from being “ancient” people caught in the stone age – a stereotype propagated in both Indonesian and international media – West Papuans are actively confronting the challenges and opportunities of the 21st century.

Despite our new findings, West Papua remains an enigma for researchers. It has a land area twice the size of Aotearoa New Zealand, but there are fewer than ten known archaeological sites that have been radiocarbon dated.

By contrast, Aotearoa has thousands of dated sites. This means West Papua is the least well researched part of the Pacific and there is much more work to be done. Crucially, Papuan scholars need to be at the heart of this research.

Dylan Gaffney, Associate Professor of Palaeolithic Archaeology, University of Oxford and Marlin Tolla, Researcher in Archaeology, Badan Riset dan Inovasi Nasional (BRIN)

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

School principals around Australia are responsible for about 4.5 million staff and students in almost 10,000 schools. Not only do they oversee students’ progress, but they are also responsible for the performance of staff and the wellbeing of everyone at their school. Their jobs are huge.

As we have previously tracked in our annual survey of principals, their jobs are also extremely stressful and they are subject to regular abuse – often from parents.

Our latest survey shows these trends are not changing. And more than 50% of those we surveyed are seriously thinking about quitting.

Our research

Since 2011, we have surveyed Australian school leaders. This includes principals, deputy principals, and other school leaders such as heads of junior or senior schools.

In our new report, we surveyed almost 2,200 people, which is more than 20% of Australian school leaders. In 2024, we surveyed primary and high school leaders from government, independent and Catholic schools all around the country.

This makes it the most comprehensive data set on principals’ health and wellbeing in Australia. It is also the longest-running survey of its type in the world.

High workloads and stress

Previous surveys have shown school principals face unsustainably high workloads and high levels of stress. Unfortunately, these trends continue in our latest 2024 results.

School leaders work an average of 54.5 hours a week during term time and 20.6 hours during holidays. They nominated the “sheer quantity of work” as the biggest source of their stress.

This was closely followed by “lack of time to focus on teaching and learning” and “student-related issues”.

As a high school principal from Western Australia told us:

I do love what I do however it is a seriously difficult role and only getting harder.

Generalised anxiety and depression reports have also increased from last year’s survey. Severe anxiety was reported by 14.8% of participants, up from 11.4% in 2023. Moderate depression is reported by 11.1% of participants, up from 10.6%.

Critical incidents

For the first time, our 2024 survey asked principals about the number of “critical incidents” they have to deal with. These are defined as an “often unexpected event that may involve loss or threat to wellbeing or personal goals”.

Nearly three-quarters (73.7%) said they had experienced a critical incident while in their role. The most common type of incident was violence and security threats (43.9%). Suicide and suicidal threats represented 12.6% of reported incidents. Participants also reported medical emergencies (10.3%) and custody or child-protection incidents (7%).

As one NSW principal told us:

I think it is untenable for principals to continue to be under constant stress at this level and am aware that many of my colleagues are also retiring or considering retiring. I have only just turned 59 and would like to work for another 5-10 years but can’t continue due to the ridiculous workload and pressure.

Schools are not safe for principals

An increasing number of principals report being subject to offensive behaviours that are unacceptable in any workplace – let alone one that involves children and young people.

Nearly 55% reported they are subjected to threats of violence, 57% are subjected to gossip and slander, and 35% are subjected to cyberbullying. These are the highest levels we have ever reported.

When asked “from whom”, more than 65% of school leaders said parents and caregivers. Students also contribute, but unfortunately, so do staff. They were the source of 29% of “gossip and slander” reported by school leaders.

As one ACT school leader told us:

The major cause of distress are parents. Parents behave in an unreasonable manner, have ridiculous expectations and think that because they went to school they can therefore run a school. Principals are constantly defending staff from parents. Parents are rarely told to stop and desist by Education Support Offices.

Many prinicpals want to leave

In 2023, we first asked the question whether school leaders seriously consider leaving their job. More than half (56%) agreed or strongly agreed with the statement.

It’s pleasing to report this has reduced slightly to 53% nationally, but the trend is, unfortunately, not consistent across the country.

For example, the figure in NSW has dropped from 63% to 51%, but in Victoria it has increased from 48% to 54%. Policymakers across jurisdictions could benefit from working together to address these findings, to see what is working and what is not.

How can we help?

The demands on today’s school principals are significant – the work takes an emotional toll – and this means we need different approaches to supporting them.

It’s why we recommend education departments and school boards provide “reflective supervision” for school leaders. This gives professionals a regular chance to reflect on what they are doing with a confidential and experienced practitioner in the field, which in this case would be another experienced school leader.

This is a widespread practice in other demanding workplaces, such as family violence, healthcare, and child mental health. Practitioners in these fields benefit through improved management of their own wellbeing, which in turn helps them support their clients and patients.

We also need to make sure governments regularly and routinely consult principals about education policy.

Schools and education departments should also explore alternative models to make the job more sustainable. This could include co-principals or job sharing models.

Without change, too many leaders will leave too quickly, without anyone left to replace them.

Paul Kidson, Senior Lecturer in Educational Leadership, Australian Catholic University; Herb Marsh, Distinguished Professor of Educational Psychology, Australian Catholic University, and Theresa Dicke, Professor, Institute for Positive Psychology and Education, Australian Catholic University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

New laws come into effect in Australia today that change the look, ingredients, and packaging of tobacco products.

The Australian government passed the package of tobacco laws in late 2023, which include:

• standardised tobacco pack and cigarette stick sizes, no more novelty pack sizes or cigarette lengths

• updated and improved graphic health warnings and quitting advice inserts within all tobacco packs

• warnings printed directly on cigarettes

• banning ingredients that make tobacco taste better and easier to smoke, including menthol.

Retailers have a three-month grace period to sell any old stock already in their stores by July 1.

Here’s what’s behind these changes – and what needs to happen next.

New graphic health warnings

Cigarette packaging requirements have been stagnant since 2012, when Australia introduced plain packaging laws that banned the use of all on-pack logos and branding. This was a world-first.

While large graphic health warnings are effective in both preventing smoking uptake and aiding quitting smoking, the effects wear out if warnings are not refreshed and varied.

Cigarette packages must carry one of ten new health warnings. Fresh warnings that smoking doubles the risk of cervical cancer and leads to diabetes will be new information for many smokers.

There are also warnings for roll-your-own, cigar, bidi and shisha tobacco packaging.

Warnings on cigarettes

Cigarettes themselves must now include one of eight health warnings printed directly on the filter paper.

Canada was the first country in the world to adopt similar requirements in 2023.

The size, shape, and colour of cigarettes has also been standardised to prevent tobacco companies from using unique cigarette designs to attract new users. Long, thin cigarettes, for example, have been marketed to women as a fashion accessory and diet tool for nearly a century.

The ingredients permitted in cigarettes are also changing, with ingredients that enhance the flavour of tobacco being now banned. The long list of prohibited ingredients includes everything from cloves, to sugar, to probiotics and vitamins.

Until now, the tobacco industry has had free reign to add ingredients that increase the palatability and attractiveness of cigarettes. This banned list also captures menthol and any ingredients that mimic the cooling properties of menthol.

Why ban menthol?

Menthol masks the harshness of smoke. Just like cold lollies that contain menthol to soothe sore throats and tame coughs, menthol in cigarettes prevents inexperienced smokers from reacting to the rough effects of tobacco smoke in the throat. This helps to make smoking a more pleasant experience that young users will return to.

The introduction of crushable menthol capsules in cigarette filters has proven very popular with Australian teenagers. Teens who use these products are more likely to have recently smoked and have higher smoking intentions in the future. The new laws also explicitly prohibit these “crush balls” or “flavour beads.”

Other counties that have banned menthol have seen drops in tobacco sales and use and increases in quitting behaviours.

No similar reforms for the United States

Menthol cigarettes have been heavily marketed to African American people since at least the 1950s and make up one-third of the total US cigarette market share. Tobacco control groups in the US have been advocating for a menthol ban for well over a decade.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) proposed a rule banning menthol in 2022, and a 2024 US Surgeon General report highlighted that menthol products increase addiction and are:

disproportionately used by Black people, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander people, women and people who identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual.

Under the Biden Administration, the FDA delayed issuing the final rule which meant the ban was not properly enacted before Trump was elected.

In January 2025, the Trump administration completely withdrew the ban.

A menthol ban in the US was predicted to reduce total smoking by 15% and the number of smoking attributable deaths among African Americans by up to 238,000.

Reforms needed to stamp out our illicit market

Organised criminals are operating in Australia’s tobacco supply chain to illegally import and sell tobacco products. Government action to step in and gain control of that supply system is long overdue.

Until this year, Australia’s two most populous states didn’t even require tobacco sellers to be licensed, and Queensland only introduced licensing last year.

Australia will need to change how tobacco is sold. It should not be so easy and commonplace to sell such an addictive and deadly product.

Both state and national governments need timely and transparent reporting on the size and scope of the illicit market, and strict licensing of the entire tobacco supply chain.

Businesses that sell illicit tobacco must face real consequences – not only large fines and loss of licences to operate, but also criminal charges.

All aspects of the tobacco supply chain – from wholesalers to retailers – must be tightly controlled.

Becky Freeman, Professor in Public Health, University of Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Getting a headache during or after exercise can be seriously frustrating – especially if you have kept hydrated to try and stop them from happening.

But why do these headaches occur? And does keeping hydrated make any difference?

What are exercise headaches?

Exercise headaches (also known as “exertional headaches”) are exactly what they sound like: headaches that occur either during, or after, exercise.

French doctor Jules Tinel first reported these headaches in the medical literature in 1932 and they’ve been a regular point of discussion since.

Exercise headaches commonly present as a throbbing pain on both sides of the head. They most often occur after strenuous exercise – although what is considered “strenuous” can differ between people, depending on their fitness levels. They can last anywhere from a few minutes to a couple of days.

Exercise headaches are thought to impact about 12% of adults, although this number varies from 1% all the way up to 26% across individual studies.

In most circumstances, these headaches are harmless and will resolve on their own, over time. Some research suggests you will stop getting them after a few months of starting a new type of workout.

But while they are usually harmless, they can sometimes signal an underlying condition that requires medical attention.

What causes exercise headaches?

Despite a good amount of research looking at exertional headaches, we don’t know their exact cause, but we do think we know why they occur.

The leading theory suggests they are caused by changes in blood flow to the brain. During intense exercise, blood vessels in the brain dilate, increasing blood flow and pressure, leading to pain.

Because long-term exercise improves our cardiovascular health, including our ability to dilate and constrict our blood vessels, this theory makes sense when we consider that exercise headaches tend to resolve themselves over time. This might explain why research suggests fitter people are less likely to get exercise headaches.

People with migraines appear more likely to experience exercise headaches, which are thought to be caused by this same mechanism.

Does heat and dehydration cause exercise headaches?

There is evidence suggesting that exercise headaches are more likely to occur in the heat.

Your brain cannot dissipate heat by sweating like the rest of your body can. So when it’s hot, your body has to increase blood flow to the brain to help bring down its temperature, which can increase pressure.

Similarly, exercise headaches also seem to get worse, and occur more often, when people are dehydrated.

However, we are not sure why this happens. Some research has shown that dehydration results in increased strain during exercise. As such, dehydration might not necessarily cause the headache, but make it more likely to occur.

Red flags: when to see a doctor

Most exercise headaches resolve themselves after a few hours and result in no lasting negative effects.

In some rare instances, they could be sign of something more serious occurring in the brain, such as a subarachnoid haemorrhage (a bleed between the brain and the tissues that cover it), reversible cerebral vasoconstriction syndrome (a spasming of blood vessels), cervical artery dissection (or tear), intracranial hypertension (pressure in the brain), or an infection.

See a doctor to rule out anything serious if:

• it’s your first exercise headache
• the headache is severe and sudden (also known as a thunderclap headache)
• it’s accompanied by other symptoms such as vision changes, confusion, or sensations of weakness
• you experience a stiff neck, nausea, or vomiting with your headache
• it lasts for more than 24 hours and doesn’t seem to be getting better.

Can you prevent exercise headaches?

There is no surefire way to prevent exercise headaches.

But a recent review suggests that ensuring you’re adequately hydrated and gradually warm-up to your desired exercise intensity can make them less likely to occur.

Beyond this, you may wish to keep your exercise intensity in a light-to moderate range for a couple of months. This will give your cardiovascular system some time to adapt before trying more strenuous exercise, hopefully reducing the likelihood of getting exercise headaches at all.

Exercise headaches are annoying, but are generally harmless and should subside on their own over time.

Hunter Bennett, Lecturer in Exercise Science, University of South Australia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

With the federal election campaign now underway, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has promised that if re-elected, Labor would seek to make price gouging illegal in the supermarket sector.

A new taskforce would be set up to examine the best way to do so, drawing on the experience of other countries. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) would then enforce the new “excessive pricing regime”.

Labor’s proposal comes despite the fact the final report from the ACCC’s supermarkets inquiry didn’t make any explicit accusation of price gouging.

Meanwhile, the Coalition and Greens still want new divestiture powers to break up the supermarkets, a course of action also not recommended by the ACCC’s report.

Price gouging

Price gouging, also referred to as “excessive pricing”, isn’t illegal in Australia. As long as prices are set independently by an individual business – and not in collusion with supposed competitors – they can be set as high or low as desired.

However, the Australian Competition and Consumer Act does allow the ACCC to monitor and regulate the price of some “notified” goods or services – with approval from the relevant federal minister.

One current example are postal services. The ACCC assesses proposed price increases, and can make an objection.

The legal situation on price gouging differs around the world.

The European Union, for example, prohibits abuse of a dominant market position by “directly or indirectly imposing unfair purchase or selling prices”.

It can be difficult to define an “unfair price”. Typically, it’s an excessive, monopolistic price higher than what would be set in a competitive market.

A landmark EU judgement defines an excessive price as one with “no reasonable relation to the economic value of the product supplied”.

Despite this ban, enforcement cases are somewhat rare. The European Commission has been more focused on tackling “exclusionary conduct” in recent decades.

This is when a competitor with significant market power uses restrictive means to directly hurt its competitors and exclude them (and future competitors) from competing in the relevant market.

An example is predatory pricing, where a company sets prices unrealistically low to drive out competitors – then becoming able to set them as high as they would like.

What about divestiture?

Both the Coalition and Greens have pledged to create new “divestiture” powers to break up supermarkets if they were found to be abusing their market power.

In competition law, divestiture is when a commercial entity is ordered to sell a portion of its assets or its business to a third party, to improve competition in the affected market.

Australian law has divestiture powers to address anti-competitive mergers and acquisitions. But currently, there aren’t powers to break up businesses for misuse of market power.

It’s a different picture in the United States, where the government has had powers to break up businesses in the context of “monopolisation” for more than a century.

The risks of splitting up

Divestiture powers were not recommended in the ACCC’s final report. That may be linked to market structure here.

The Australian grocery retail market is highly concentrated. The majority of retail sales are shared among only a few supermarket chains, primarily Woolworths (38%) and Coles (29%).

However, the combined share of these two retail giants has declined over the past 14 years, from 80% to 67%. Meanwhile, Aldi’s market share has grown to 9%, showing these two retailers face some competition.

This suggests divestiture may be a misguided approach. There are specific risks that come with divestiture remedies.

For instance, who would purchase the assets under a specific divestiture order? When considering the structure of the current grocery retail market, there is a high risk it would be another powerful retailer interested in purchasing its competitor’s assets. This would defeat the purpose entirely.

Other measures already in motion

Any ban on price gouging or new divestiture powers should be implemented with caution and used as a temporary tool. Directly interfering with free markets comes with risks.

Other actions are already underway to boost competition in the sector and improve supermarkets’ dealings with suppliers.

The federal government has previously announced incentives for the states to “cut planning and zoning red tape”, with the aim of making it easier for smaller supermarkets to enter the market and compete.

And from April, the Food and Grocery Code of Conduct will be made mandatory and enforceable, in line with a key recommendation of the independent Emerson review.

Certain restrictive and unfair practices in dealing with suppliers will be directly prohibited and enforced.

The new code gives the ACCC a range of useful tools to enforce against a breach by a powerful supermarket chain.

These include:

• a confidential channel for whistleblowing suppliers
• effective dispute resolution to address lengthy and costly litigation
• heavy penalties – as high as A$10 million or 10% of annual turnover – for serious breaches of the code.

Rather than bring in measures that have not been independently recommended – like a price gouging ban or divestiture powers – it would be worth first seeing how these new enforceable rules work to deliver a better deal for supermarket customers.

Barbora Jedlickova, Senior Lecturer, School of Law, The University of Queensland

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

How do Australians feel about knowing the territory we inhabit was violently stolen from First Nations people? In Unsettled, Kate Grenville explores this through her own feelings. “I’ve been circling this book for years,” she writes.

But its immediate context is the 60% “No” vote in the 2023 referendum to establish an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to parliament, and to the executive government, which develops laws and policies.

The slogan “If you don’t know, vote No” gave Australians “permission to keep looking away” from the past, Grenville writes. She invites us to look into that past, accompanying her on a journey that leaves her “unsettled”, but hopeful.

Review: Unsettled: a journey through time and place – Kate Grenville (Black Inc.)

For Grenville, the difference between knowing the truth of Australia’s past and feeling it is significant. An accomplished historical novelist, she has taken readers into the imagined inner lives of colonist characters in books like The Secret River (2005), allowing us to feel what they felt. In Unsettled, she invites us to witness and share her responses to places and stories of colonial land theft.

Feeling the violence of stolen land

Most Australians acknowledge the violence of colonisation. In August 2022, a Reconciliation Australia survey found 76% of the general community believed First Nations people “were subject to mass killings, incarceration, forced removal from land and restricted movement throughout the 1800s”. The same survey found 63% believed “Frontier wars occurred across the Australian continent” as First Nations people “defended their traditional lands from European invasion”.

Revisionist scholarship has made these beliefs historical orthodoxy. They have entered the curricula of Australian schools and universities. They have informed legal judgements (like Mabo, which recognised “native title” as a property right based on First Nations customary law), films, TV programs, novels and poetry.

Critical accounts of the nation’s “appalling” past have even been acknowledged as valid by former prime minister John Howard. While rejecting “black armband history”, he told parliament in October 1996: “I regret as an Australian the appalling way in which members of the Indigenous community have been treated in the past and I believe the truth about what occurred in our history should be taught in an unvarnished fashion.”

However, for Kate Grenville, it is not enough to know Australia is stolen land: she wants to feel it, and she hopes readers will too.

Unsettled narrates what she calls her “pilgrimage” to places where her ancestors “settled”. Early on, she announces self transformation as the goal of her journey: “The body moves through space, and with it the spirit might move through understanding.”

In each place she visits, she wonders how her forebears interacted with (or insulated themselves from) Indigenous Australians, as they “took up” the land. She analyses this widely used term for us, arguing when we add “up” to “took” or “take”, we weaken the sense that to “take” is to “steal”.

The pilgrimage’s first pause is at Wiseman’s Ferry, on the Hawkesbury River: named after Solomon Wiseman, the ancestor Grenville fictionally evoked as a colonist of Dharug country in her widely admired novel The Secret River. There she finds herself “shocked”, “confused” and “irritable” that she had not seen what this place “had to show me” on previous visits.

Grenville thus declares the purpose of her pilgrimage: to make herself emotionally vulnerable to knowledge. Implicitly, she imagines (or calls into being) a reader willing to rethink their own place in history, as receivers of the colonists’ insular legacy. Grenville exemplifies Australians’ possible openness to a loss of self assurance. Her book is an invitation to national uncertainty.

As she travels, she moves from her most time-distant ancestor, Wiseman, to her parents’ generation. (The 20 places named for the reader and visited include St Albans, Wollombi, Gunnedah and Tamworth.)

One source is her mother’s recorded memories, the basis of Grenville’s biographical 2015 book, One Life: My Mother’s Story. Here, she revisits her mother’s words with a sharpened awareness of what her mother’s generation didn’t know, or did not think it important to dwell on.

Tracing this descent, paying close attention to the terminology used in monuments and in family anecdotes, Grenville enacts her own emancipation from not seeing to seeing, from self-enclosure to emotionally risky openness. She urges Australians to reevaluate the self-understanding passed down to them by parents, grandparents and the wider culture.

Truth-telling and owning the past

National learning as personal quest is a beguiling way to portray contemporary Australian historical consciousness. Dja Dja Wurrung and Yorta Yorta journalist Bridget Brennan demonstrated this in last week’s Four Corners program on Victoria’s Yoorrook Justice Commission.

Her interviews with two witnesses to the Commission presented national enlightenment as the hoped-for sum of many hard individual journeys. A woman continuing her deceased husband’s pastoral enterprise on the site of the 1843 Warrigal Creek massacre was “grappling with how best to protect and honour the massacre site for future generations”. A descendant of Alfred Deakin apologised for his 1886 legislation that forced Aboriginal people of mixed descent off reserves, in the hope they would assimilate to the settler community.

I take Brennan to be saying that if non-Indigenous Australians are to “own” their past, they must open themselves to dialogue with the colonised – such as the commissioners of Yoorrook.

Grenville’s pilgrim self does not encounter actual Indigenous interlocutors. They are absent – for a variety of reasons – from the places her ancestors “took up”. They are imaginably present for her, however. Unsettled often recreates the structure of feeling produced by Jindyworobak poets such as Rex Ingamells: the intimation of an Aboriginal presence that persists in the land itself, beyond colonial erasure.

Indeed, the literary precedents of Unsettled go back to poems inspired by horror at the 1838 Myall Creek Massacre: Elizabeth Hamilton Dunlop’s The Aboriginal Mother (From Myall’s Creek) (1838) and Charles Harpur’s A Wail from the Bush (1845).

Grenville closes her book with a visit to the Myall Creek monument erected in 2000, near Bingara. There she allows herself to feel “shame, disgust, horror” as “the price to pay for being who I am”. Those who erected the monument – descended from both slayers and slain – are her exemplary Australians.

On difficult terms with multiculturalism

To say Unsettled is a sustained performance of a postcolonial conscience is not to belittle it. Its great achievement is the effortless and artful intertwining of received histories of the nation with stories specific to Grenville’s family. However, Unsettled is on difficult terms with another progressive Australian ideology: multiculturalism. I mean two things by this.

Recent migrants to Australia will be limited in their capacity to identify with Grenville’s deep colonial lineage. Subject to (at times) self-lacerating review, this heritage is not only Grenville’s burden, but also the cultural asset that enables her pilgrimage.

Those best placed to identify with her anguish are not only those yearning for truth-telling, but those descended, like her, from several generations of colony-born “natives”. This is the effect of the book’s configuration of self, family and nation.

The premise of shared heritage – celebrated or criticised – is vulnerable in a nation adding so rapidly to its stock of people.

It is likely that a large proportion of those who voted in the 2023 referendum are of non-British heritage. Of the three million permanent migrants added to Australia’s population between 2000 and 2021, settling mainly in the capital cities, one in three were from India, China, the Philippines or Vietnam; 77% of migrants who have lived in Australia for more than ten years have become citizens and eligible to vote. Even if these “new Australians” know they are beneficiaries of violent colonisation, what does that knowledge mean to them?

Migration, the severing of a person from place and people, requires some erasure of a person’s past. This is for some, no doubt, part of its allure. Whether experienced as loss or renewal of self, this severance may breed an impatience with claims – moral or political – that invoke heritage.

On 24 May 2023, Michael Sukkar (Liberal member for Deakin and member of a Lebanese migrant family) heard Yes advocates refer to the ancient heritage of Indigenous Australians as if it were the basis of their right to a Voice. He replied, explaining his “vehement” opposition to the Voice, by expounding a migrant version of the equality ethos.

It didn’t matter if your family went back to the First Fleet or whether your family went back 60,000 years or whether your family arrived a couple of years ago and were at last night’s citizenship ceremony. The minute you were an Australian citizen, you were, in every single way, equal. There was no grading. There were no different rights or different rules for one or the other.

Unsettled, and the collective memory and identity it invokes, speaks powerfully to a structure of postcolonial feeling within Australian society that is significant, but may be of diminishing influence. Today, Australia’s high (diversely sourced) migration challenges the very possibility of a collective memory.

Tim Rowse, Emeritus Professor, Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

When a vehicle and a cyclist collide, the cyclist almost always emerges worse off. Globally, more than 40,000 cyclists are killed and millions more seriously injured in road crashes.

In most of these collisions, the driver is responsible.

So, what factors are involved when a cyclist and a car collide?

The most common factors

The most common types of vehicle-cyclist crashes are caused by:

• drivers turning in front of cyclists
• drivers not giving right-of-way to cyclists
• drivers opening doors in front of cyclists
• drivers side-swiping cyclists by passing too close to them
• drivers rear-ending cyclists.

When drivers ‘look-but-failed-to-see’

Many drivers fail to notice cyclists until it’s too late. Sometimes this phenomenon is referred to as SMIDSY (“sorry mate, I didn’t see you”).

Crash researchers often classify these types of crash as a “looked-but-failed-to-see” error.

Cyclists are extremely susceptible to this. They are small, not a safety threat to drivers, are outnumbered and are typically ranked low on a driver’s “attentional hierarchy”. It may also be that drivers just don’t expect cyclists to be around.

Cyclists can be inconspicuous but even if they are visible, drivers may look but not “see” them because they’re focusing on something else.

This selective attention test highlights how easy it is to end up in a looked-but-failed-to-see situation:

It is inevitable drivers will occasionally make errors resulting in near misses and crashes. Telling drivers to look out for cyclists and not crash into them won’t stop crashes with cyclists. So what might help?

Solutions with limited effectiveness

While errors are inevitable, improving road infrastructure and using layouts that highlight cyclists in potential conflict areas can help.

In practice, this means things such as advanced stop lines or holding areas that place cyclists ahead of motor vehicles at intersections so cyclists are more visible and can move off safely.

Advanced green lights (where the traffic light turns green for cyclists before it does for cars) could also help, as they allow cyclists to move off while motor vehicle traffic is still stopped.

Bicycle-activated warning signage provide a visual warning to alert drivers that a cyclist is near by.

Improved road lighting to highlight cyclists better on the network at night, would also help.

There are also things cyclists can do to improve their own safety. These include

• using permanent running lights (bicycle lights that are constantly on)
• wearing bright clothes
• wearing reflective strips on their lower legs to highlight the natural motion of their feet and legs.

Many roads have white lines painted on them to allocate separate space to cyclists and there are mandatory passing distance laws throughout Australia as well as in some international jurisdictions.

However, research has shown that close passing is still relatively common and that painted bike lanes may actually increase the frequency or severity of these dangerous interactions.

Speed limit reform

If we know that errors are inevitable and crashes will occur, then we should make those events survivable.

Humans are fragile. Being struck by a car at 50 km/h is estimated to result in a 90% chance of being killed. At 30 km/h, the risk of being killed decreases to just 10%.

Speed limits of 40 km/h and 30 km/h improve safety for both cyclists and pedestrians, particularly in high pedestrian and cyclist locations.

While lowering speed limits is widely supported within the road safety fraternity, more efforts are needed to promote acceptance throughout the wider community.

Autonomous emergency braking

One opportunity for reducing or eliminating collisions with cyclists (in the absence of speed limit reform) may be with advanced driver assistance systems such as autonomous emergency braking.

These systems constantly and rapidly process visual information in the traffic environment.

They can help prevent certain crashes, or reduce collision speeds, when human error occurs.

They can also help prevent “dooring”, which is where a cyclist collides with a car door suddenly opened by the driver.

However, these technologies are not 100% effective; emergency situations between vehicles and cyclists can occur suddenly, with little time for automated systems to respond appropriately.

These systems are also generally only available on newer vehicles. Given the average age of Australian vehicles is over 11 years, it will take some time before they are widely prevalent and have a significant influence on bicycle safety.

Eliminating conflicts

Dedicated separated infrastructure is optimal for cyclist safety as it avoids interactions between vehicles and cyclists completely.

However, this infrastructure often forces cyclists to share space with pedestrians such as children, dog walkers, wheelchair users, and parents with prams (which can introduce other safety issues).

Additionally, these dedicated separated paths are not always well connected, or may “lead to nowhere”, so they don’t always appeal to cyclists.

Another way to eliminate conflicts is through changes to the traffic network. For example, controlling turn movements at traffic lights with right-turn arrows means drivers no longer need to decide when it’s safe to turn.

But this comes at a cost to traffic efficiency. In our society, unfortunately, there are many who value lost time more than the cost of road crashes and injury trauma.

Ultimately, if we want to focus on the value of human life and live-ability, we need to rethink the transport hierarchy to place more value on the most vulnerable road users. This could be achieved with “presumed liability” laws, where a driver who collides with a cyclist must prove they were not at fault.

Finally, we should remember that we are all vulnerable at some point in our transport journeys.

Giulio Ponte, Research Engineer at the Centre for Automotive Safety Research, University of Adelaide and Jamie Mackenzie, Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Automotive Safety Research, University of Adelaide

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has finally ended weeks of speculation and named the election date for the national parliament.

After months of unofficial campaigning, Australians will now be treated to a festival of democracy as promises are made, policies are announced, and the leaders travel the country to rally support.

Much of the campaigning by the parties will be focused on the House of Representatives. This is to be expected as the lower house is where government is formed by the party that wins the majority of seats in this chamber, and the leader of this party becomes prime minister.

While the election for the lower house dominates the campaign, the contest for the Senate is rarely mentioned.

This is a bit unfair as the Senate is an immensely powerful chamber.

The power of the Senate

Barring its inability to initiate or amend supply bills, the Senate has almost the same powers as the House of Representatives. Senators can introduce their own bills, as long as they’re not supply bills.

For any proposed bill to become law, it must be passed by the Senate as well as the House of Representatives.

All states have equal representation in the chamber. Currently, every state is represented by 12 senators, each with six-year terms.

This means half the Senate is up for election at every general election.

The territories are represented by two senators each and they face re-election at every general election. The current number of senators is 76.

Winning a majority in the Senate has no bearing on who forms government (it’s the result of the lower house – the House of Representatives – which determines this). It does, however, make it easier for the government to pass bills to become law if it enjoys a majority in this chamber.

Who wins seats in the Senate?

The voting system in the Senate is very different to the House of Representatives. To win a seat in the House of Representatives, a candidate must win 50% +1 of the votes cast in the district.

In the Senate, however, a candidate must win a proportion (approximately 14.3%) of the state-wide vote.

This makes it a bit easier for minor parties to win representation as they can rely on broad support from across the state to reach the required threshold.

Changes introduced in 2016 mean Australians have choice on how to complete their Senate ballot paper. They can either number six or more candidates of their choice above the black line, or vote below the line by numbering 12 or more candidates.

While parties will organise their own preference deals to benefit them, voters are ultimately in control of where their preferences go.

Thanks to the voting system used in the Senate, it is rare for a government to hold a majority of seats in the upper house. The last time this occurred was in 2004 when the John Howard-led Coalition enjoyed a majority in the chamber.

The current Senate

Following the 2022 election, both major parties lost ground in the Senate. To have a majority in the chamber, a party must have 39 seats. Currently, Labor has 25 representatives, while the Coalition has 30.

The remaining seats are held by the Greens with the third highest number of representatives (11), One Nation (2), Jacqui Lambie Network (1), United Australia Party (1), and six Independents.

Several high-profile senators are up for election in 2025. In Queensland, for example, Malcolm Roberts from Pauline Hanson’s One Nation will be up for re-election, Jacqui Lambie will be recontesting in Tasmania, while Independent Senator David Pocock from the ACT will be seeking another term.

There will also be some other prominent senators hoping to be re-elected from established parties.

These include Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price (Country Liberal Party) and Senator Malarndirri McCarthy (ALP) from the Northern Territory, Liberal James Paterson from Victoria, Sarah Hanson-Young from the Greens in South Australia, and Jordan Steele-John from the Greens in Western Australia.

The 2025 contest

Fewer people have been voting for the major parties in recent years. In 2022, the vote for non-major party candidates reached a high of 35.7% (which, as Antony Green reminds us, was higher than the primary vote for both the Coalition and Labor).

Since the 1980s, Australians appear to have become open to supporting non-major party candidates contesting the Senate. If this continues as expected in 2025, whoever becomes prime minister will have to deal with the diverse interests and policy demands from those in the upper house.

While the campaign for the Senate may go under the radar over the next few weeks, who is elected to the Senate will have a massive impact on Australian politics for years to come.

Zareh Ghazarian, Senior Lecturer, School of Social Sciences, Monash University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

More than 7 million people in Australia were born overseas. Some 5.8 million people report speaking a language other than English at home.

But how well are we looking after culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) Australians?

In countries around the world, evidence suggests people from CALD backgrounds are at increased risk of harm as a result of the health care they receive when compared to the general population. Common problems include a higher risk of contracting a hospital-acquired infection or medication errors.

People receiving cancer care are at particularly high risk of harm associated with their health care.

In a recent study, we found CALD cancer patients in Australia had roughly a one-in-three risk of something going wrong during their cancer care. This is unacceptably high.

We reviewed medical records

We worked with four cancer services (two in New South Wales and two in Victoria) that provide care to high proportions of people from CALD backgrounds. These four cancer services offer a combination of care to patients in hospitals, clinics and in their homes.

We analysed de-identified medical records of people from CALD backgrounds who received care at any of the four cancer services during 2018. To identify CALD patients, we used information from their medical records including “country of birth”, “preferred language”, “language spoken at home” and “interpreter required”.

We reviewed a total of 628 medical records of CALD cancer patients. We found roughly one in three medical records (212 out of 628) had at least one patient safety event recorded. We defined a patient safety event as any event that could have or did result in harm to the patient as a result of the health care they receive. We also found 44 patient records had three or more safety events recorded over a 12-month period.

Medication-related safety events were common, such as the wrong medication type or dose being given to a patient. Sometimes the patients themselves took the wrong type or dose of a medication or stopped medication all together. We also observed a variety of other patient safety events such as falls, pressure ulcers and infections after surgery.

The number of incidents could even be higher than what we observed. We know from other research that not all patient safety events are documented.

We didn’t have a control group, which is the main limitation of our study. In other words, we didn’t examine medical records of patients from non-CALD backgrounds to compare how common patient safety events were between groups.

But looking at other data suggests the rate of incidents is much higher in CALD patients.

Studies over many years indicate around one in ten patients admitted to hospital experience a safety event.

One study from Norway found cancer patients have a 39% greater risk of experiencing adverse events in hospital when compared to other patients (24.2% compared to 17.4%).

Why is the risk of incidents so high for CALD patients?

We identified miscommunication as a key factor that put cancer patients from CALD backgrounds at risk.

For example, we observed from one patient’s notes that the patient didn’t take their medication because they were confused by the instructions given by different clinicians. This confusion might have stemmed from language barriers or health literacy issues.

In some medical records, we also saw interpreter requirements were unmet. For example, at the time of admission, assessment for language needs noted an interpreter was not required. However, later notes mentioned the patient had poor English or needed an interpreter.

Also, with the limited availability of interpreters, they’re often reserved for specialist appointments, and not used for “routine” tasks, such as during chemotherapy treatment. This may result in side effects from cancer medications not being properly identified and responded to, potentially leading to patient harm.

What can we do to improve things?

To make care safer, patients, their families and the clinicians who care for them should come together so that any solutions developed are practical, relevant, and informed by their combined experiences.

As an example, we developed a tool with consumers from CALD backgrounds and their clinicians that seeks to ensure that when patient medications are changed, there is common understanding between the clinician and the patient of their medication and care instructions. This includes recognising the side effects of the medications and who to contact if they have concerns.

This tool uses images and simple language to support common understanding of medication and care instructions. It takes into account specific cultural expectations and is available in different languages. It’s currently being evaluated in two cancer clinics.

To make cancer care safer for patients from CALD backgrounds, health systems and services will need to support and invest in strategies that are specifically targeted towards people from these backgrounds. This will ensure more equitable health solutions that improve the health of all Australians.

Ashfaq Chauhan, Research Fellow, Australian Institute of Health Innovation, Macquarie University; Melvin Chin, Senior Lecturer, School of Clinical Medicine, UNSW Sydney; Meron Pitcher, Honorary, Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences, The University of Melbourne, and Reema Harrison, Professor, Australian Institute of Health Innovation, Macquarie University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

When Lisa’s husband passed away unexpectedly, she assumed accessing his superannuation death benefit would be straightforward. Instead, she spent months navigating a bureaucratic maze.

She repeatedly sent documents, waited weeks for callbacks and struggled to get answers from his fund.

Her experience is far from unique. A damning new report reveals systemic failure by Australia’s A$4 trillion superannuation industry in handling members’ death benefits.

A system in disarray

The Australian Security and Investments Commission’s landmark review of ten major super trustees, managing 38% of super assets, exposes an industry that is not serving its members.

Grieving families routinely face excessive delays, insensitive treatment and unnecessary hurdles when trying to access death benefits. It found they sometimes waited over a year for payments to which they were legally entitled.

The central problem was a fundamental breakdown in claims processing, with five critical failures exacerbating inefficiency and distress.

1. Poor oversight

No trustee monitored end-to-end claims handling times, leaving boards unaware of how long families were waiting. While the fastest trustee resolved 48% of claims within 90 days, the slowest managed just 8%.

In one case, a widow waited nearly a year despite her husband having a valid binding nomination. ASIC found 78% of delays stemmed from processing inefficiencies entirely within trustees’ control.

2. Misleading and inadequate information

Many funds misled on processing times and masked extreme delays. Boards often received reports only on insured claims, despite most death benefits not involving insurance. This meant boards were unable to fix systemic problems.

3. Process over people

Risk-averse procedures often overrode common sense. Many funds imposed claim-staking – delaying payments for objections – even for straightforward cases, adding a median 95 day delay.

Communication failures further compounded delays, with claimants receiving inconsistent advice and few or no status updates.

4. Outsourcing without accountability

Claims handled in-house were processed significantly faster than those managed by external administrators. Only 15% of outsourced claims were resolved within 90 days, compared to 36% of in-house claims.

The securities commission is calling for stronger oversight. External administrators significantly slow down responses, so some funds may need to bring claims processing back in-house to ensure efficiency.

5. Lack of transparency

Many funds failed to provide clear timelines or explanations for delays and had no accountability mechanisms.

The ten funds investigated include the Australian Retirement Trust, Avanteos (Colonial First State), Brighter Super, Commonwealth Superannuation Corporation, HESTA, Hostplus, NM Super (AMP), Nulis (MLC), Rest and UniSuper.

Two others, Australian Super and Cbus, are being sued separately by ASIC for either failing to pay out or delaying payments to thousands of eligible beneficiaries.

Will ASIC’s fixes work?

ASIC has made 34 recommendations to improve death benefit processing. This will require real change, not box ticking. Changes should include setting performance objectives and empowering frontline staff to cut unnecessary steps.

There should be consequences for failure. Unlike the United Kingdom, which fines pension providers for missing statutory deadlines, ASIC’s recommendations lack penalties.

Without consequences, some funds may continue prioritising administrative convenience over members receiving their entitlements.

What needs to happen now?

ASIC’s report is a wake-up call, but real reform requires strong action.

Super funds must be held to clear, binding processing timelines, with meaningful penalties for non-compliance. Standardising requirements across the industry would eliminate unnecessary hurdles, ensuring all beneficiaries are treated fairly.

Beyond regulation, funds must improve communication and accountability. Bereaved families deserve clear, plain language guidance on what to expect, not bureaucratic roadblocks or sudden document requests.

Technological upgrades should focus on reducing delays, not just internal efficiencies.

And to better support families, an independent claims advocate could help navigate the process, ensuring no one is left to struggle alone.

Has ASIC gone far enough?

While ASIC’s review is a step in the right direction, it does not fundamentally overhaul flawed claims-handling practices.

The recommendations lack enforceability, relying on voluntary compliance.

Also, the role of insurers within super remains largely unaddressed, despite death benefits being tied to life insurance policies. This often causes further complications and delays.

Ensuring insurers adopt and apply ASIC’s recommendations will be critical for meaningful change.

Most importantly, super funds must remember that behind every claim is a grieving family. No one should have to fight for what they are owed during one of the most stressful times in their life.

Natalie Peng, Lecturer in Accounting, The University of Queensland

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.